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THE 

LITERARY CHARACTER, 

ILLUSTRATED 

BY 

THE HISTORY 

OF 
DRAWN FROM THEIR OWN FEELINGS AND CONFESSIONS. 

BY THE AUTHOR OF « CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. 



M Poi che veder voi stessi non potete, 
Vedete in altri almen quel che voi sete." 

Cino da Pistoia, addressed to the Eyes of his Mistress, 



NEW-FORK: 

PUBLISHED BY JAMES EASTBURN AND CO= 

AT THE LITERARY ROOMS, BROADWAY, 

CORNER OF PINE-STREET. 

1818. 



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PREFACE. 

V 

I published, in 1795, « an Essay on the 
Literary Character j" to my own habitual 
and inherent defects, were superadded 
those of rny youth ; the crude production 
was, however, not ill received, for the 
Edition disappeared; and the subject 
was found to be more interesting than 
the writer. 

During the long interval which has 
elapsed since the first publication, the 
little volume was often recalled to my 
recollection, by several, and by. some who 
have since obtained celebrity ; they ima- 
gined that their attachment to literary 
pursuits had been strengthened even by 
so weak an effort. An extraordinary cir- 
cumstance has concurred with these opin- 



PREFACE. 



ions ;— a copy which has accidentally fallen 
into my hands formerly belonged to the 
great poetical genius of our times ; and 
the singular fact that it was twice read by 
him in two subsequent years, at Athens, 
in 1810 and 181], instantly convinced me 
that the volume deserved my attention. 
I tell this fact assuredly, not from any little 
vanity which it may appear to betray, for 
the truth is, were I not as liberal and as 
candid in respect to my own productions, 
as I hope I am to others, I could not have 
been gratified by the present circum- 
stance ; for the marginal notes of the 
noble writer convey no flattery — but 
amidst their pungency and sometimes 
their truth, the circumstance that a man 
of genius could, and did read, this slight 
effusion at two different periods of his life, 
was a sufficient authority, at least for an 
author, to return it once more to the anvil ; 
more knowledge, and more maturity of 
thought, I may hope, will now fill up the 
rude sketch of my youth ; its radical de- 
fects, those which are inherent in every 



PREFACE. £ 

author, it were unwise for me to hope to 
remove by suspending the work to a more 
remote period. 

It may be thought that men of genius 
only should write on men of genius ; as if 
it were necessary that the physician 
should be infected with the disease of his 
patient. He is only an observer, like Sy- 
denham who confined himself to vigilant 
observation, and the continued experience 
of tracing the progress of actual cases 
(and in his department, but not in mine) 
in th<» operation of actual remedies. He 
beautifully says — " Whoever describes a 
violet exactly as to its colour, taste, smell, 
form, and other properties, will find the 
description agree in most particulars with 
all the violets in the universe." 

Nor do I presume to be any thing more 
than the historian of genius ; whose humble 
office is only to tell the virtues and the 
infirmities of his heroes. It is the fash- 
ion of the present day to raise up daz- 

A 2 



6 PREFACE. 

zling theories of genius ; to reason a pri- 
ori ; to promulgate abstract paradoxes; 
to treat with levity the man of genius, 
because he is only a man of genius. I have 
sought for facts, and have often drawn 
results unsuspected by myself. I have 
looked into literary history for the litera- 
ry character. I have always had in my 
mind an observation of Lord Bolingbroke 
— " Abstract, or general propositions, 
though never so true, appear obscure or 
doubtful to us very often till they are ex- 
plained by examples ; when examples are 
pointed out to us, there is a kind of ap- 
peal, with which we are flattered, made 
to our senses, as well as to our understand- 
ings. The instruction comes then from 
our authority; we yield to fact when we 
resist speculation." This will be truth 
long after the encyclopedic geniuses of 
the present age, who write on all subjects, 
and with most spirit on those they know 
least about, shall have passed away ; and 
Time shall extricate Truth from the dead- 
ly embrace of Sophistry. 



ON THE 

LITERARY CHARACTER, 

8fc. fyc. 

CHAPTER I. 

ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 

Since the discovery of that art which multiplies 
at will the productions of the human intellect, 
and spreads them over the universe in the conse- 
quent formation of libraries, a class or order of 
men has arisen, who appear throughout Europe 
to have derived a generic title in that of literary 
characters ; a denomination which, however 
vague, defines the pursuits of the individual, 
and serves, at times, to separate him from other 
professions. 

Formed by the same habits, and influenced by 
the same motives, notwithstanding the difference 
of talents and tempers, the opposition of times 



8 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 

and places, they have always preserved among 
themselves the most striking family resemblance. 
The literary character, from the objects in which 
it concerns itself, is of a more independent and 
permanent nature than those which are perpetu- 
ally modified by the change of manners, and are 
more distinctly national. Could we describe the 
medical, the commercial, or the legal character 
of other ages, this portrait of antiquity would be 
like a perished picture : the subject itself would 
have altered its position in the revolutions of 
society. It is not so with the literary character. 
The passion for study ; the delight in books ; the 
desire of solitude and celebrity ; the obstructions 
of life ; the nature of their habits and pursuits ; 
the triumphs and the disappointments of literary 
glory ; all these are as truly described by Cicero 
and the younger Pliny, as by Petrarch and Eras- 
mus, and as they have been by Hume and Gibbon. 
The passion for collecting together the treasures 
of literature and the miracles of art, was as insa- 
tiable a thirst in Atticus as in the French Peiresc, 
and in our Cracherodes and Townleys. We 
trace the feelings of our literary contemporaries 
in all ages, and every people who have deserved 
to rank among polished nations. Such were 
those literary characters who have stamped the 
images of their minds on their works, and that 



ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 9 

other race, who preserve the circulation of this 
intellectual coinage ; 

Gold of the Dead, 



Which Time does still disperse, but not devour. 

D'Avenant's Gondibert, c. v. s. 3$. 

These literary characters now constitute an 
important body, diffused over enlightened Eu- 
rope, connected by the secret links of congenial 
pursuits, and combining often insensibly to them- 
selves in the same common labours. At London, 
at Paris, and even at Madrid, these men feel the 
same thirst, which is allayed at the same foun- 
tains ; the same authors are read, and the same 
opinions are formed. 

Contemporains de tous les hommes, 
Et citoyens de tous les lieux. 

De la Mothe. 

Thus an invisible brotherhood is existing 
among us, and those who stand connected with it 
are not always sensible of this kindred alliance. 
Once the world was made uneasy by rumours of 
the existence of a society, founded by that extra- 
ordinary German Rosicrucius, designed for the 
search of truth and the reformation of the sci- 
ences. Its statutes were yet but partially pro- 



10 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 

mulgated ; but many a great principle in morals, 
many a result of science in the concentrated 
form of an axiom ; and every excellent work 
which suited the views of the author to preserve 
anonymous, were mysteriously traced to the pre- 
sident of the Rosicrucians, and not only the 
society became celebrated, but abused. Des- 
cartes, when in Germany, gave himself much 
trouble to track out the society, that he might 
consult the great searcher after Truth, but in 
vain ! It did not occur to the young reformer 
of science in this visionary pursuit, that every 
philosophical inquirer was a brother, and that 
the extraordinary and mysterious personage, was 
indeed himself! for a genius of the first order is 
always the founder of a society, and, wherever 
he may be, the brotherhood will delight to ac- 
knowledge their master. 

These Literary Characters are partially de- 
scribed by Johnson, not without a melancholy 
colouring. " To talk in private, to think in soli- 
tude, to inquire or to answer inquiries, is the bu- 
siness of a scholar. He wanders about the world 
without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor 
valued, but by men like himself." But eminent 
Genius accomplishes a more ample design. He 
belongs to the world as much as to a nation ; even 



ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 11 

the great writer himself, at that moment, was not 
conscious that he was devoting his days to cast the 
minds of his own contemporaries, and of the next 
age, in the mighty mould of his own, for he w r as 
of that order of men whose individual genius of- 
ten becomes that of a people. A prouder con- 
ception rose in the majestic mind of Milton, of 
" that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise, which 
God and good men have consented shall be the 
reward of those whose published labours ad- 
vance the good of mankind." 

Literature has, in all ages, encountered adver- 
saries from causes sufficiently obvious; but other 
pursuits have been rarely liable to discover ene- 
mies among their own votaries. Yet many litera- 
ry men openly, or insidiously, would lower the 
Literary Character, are eager to confuse the ranks 
in the republic of letters, wanting the virtue which 
knows to pay its tribute to Caesar ; while they 
maliciously confer the character of author on that 
" Ten Thousand," whose recent list is not so 
much a muster-roll of heroes, as a table of pop- 
ulation.* 

We may allow the political ceconomist to sup- 
pose that an author is the manufacturer of a 

' See a recent biographical account of ten thousand authors. 



12 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 

certain ware for " a very paltry recompense," as 
their seer Adam Smith has calculated. It is use- 
less to talk to people who have nothing but mill- 
ions in their imagination, and whose choicest works 
of art are spinning jennies ; whose principle of 
" labour" would have all men alike die in harness ; 
or, in their carpentry of human nature, would con- 
vert them into wheels and screws, to work the 
perplexed movements of that ideal machinery 
called " capital" — these may reasonably doubt of 
" the utility" of this " unproductive" race. Their 
heated heads and temperate hearts may satisfy 
themselves that " that unprosperous race of men, 
called men of letters," in a system of political 
ceconomy, must necessarily occupy their present 
state in society, much as formerly when u a scholar 
and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly 
synonimous."* But whenever the political cecon- 
omists shall feel, — a calculation of time which 
who would dare to furnish them with? — that the 
happiness and prosperity of a people include 
something more permanent and more evident 
than " the wealth of a nation," they may form 
another notion of the literary character. 

A more formidable class of ingenious men who 
derived their reputation and even their fortune in 

* Wealth of Nations, v. i. p. 182. 



ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. |g 

life from their literary character, yet are cold and 
heartless to the interests of literature — men who 
have reached their summit and reject the ladder : 
for those who have - once placed themselves high, 
feel a sudden abhorrence of climbing. These 
have risen through the gradations of politics into 
office, and in that busy world view every thing in a 
cloud of passions and politics ; — they who once 
commanded us by their eloquence would now 
drive us by the single force of despotism ; like 
Adrian VI. who obtaining the Pontificate as the 
reward of his studies, yet possessed of the Tiara, 
persecuted students 5 he dreaded, say the Italians, 
lest his brothers might shake the Pontificate it- 
self. It fares worse with authors when minds of 
this cast become the arbiters of the public opin- 
ion ; when the literary character is first systemat- 
ically degraded and then sported with, as ele- 
phants are made to dance on hot iron ; or the 
bird plucked of its living feathers -is exhibited as 
a new sort of creature to invite the passengers ! 
whatever such critics may plead to mortify the 
vanity of authors, at least it requires as much 
to give effect to their own polished effrontery. 
Lower the high self-reverence, the lofty concep- 
tion of Genius, and you deprive it of the con- 
sciousness of its powers with the delightfulnes.s 



J 4 ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 

of its character ; in the blow you give the musical 
instrument, the invisible soul of its tone is for 
ever lost. 

r 

A lighter class reduce literature to a mere 
curious amusement ; a great work is likened to a 
skilful game of billiards, or a piece of music 
finely executed— and curious researches, to char- 
ade making and Chinese puzzles. An author 
with them is an idler who will not be idle, amu- 
sing, or fatiguing others, who are completely so. 
We have been told that a great genius should 
not therefore " ever allow himself to be sensible 
to his own celebrity, nor deem his pursuits of 
much consequence however important or suc- 
cessful." Catholic doctrine to mortify an author 
into a saint; Lent all the year, and self-flagel- 
lation every day ! This new principle, which no 
man in his senses would contend with, had been 
useful to BufTon and Gibbon, to Voltaire and 
Pope, — who assuredly were too " sensible to 
their celebrity, and deemed their pursuits of 
much consequence," particularly when " im- 
portant and successful." But this point may 
be adjusted when we come to examine the im- 
portance of an author, and the privilege he may 
possess of a little anticipating the public, in his 
self-praise. 



ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 15 

Such are the domestic treasons of the literary 
character against literature— " et tu, Brute I" — 
but a hero of literature falls not though struck 
at; he outlives his assassins — and might address 
them in that language of poetry and tenderness 
with which a Mexican king reproached his trai- 
torous counsellors : " You were the feathers of 
my wings, and the eyelids of my eyes." 

Every class of men in society have their pecu- 
liar sorrows and enjoyments, as they have their 
habits and their characteristics. In the history 
of men of genius, we may often open the secret 
story of their minds; they have, above othersi 
the privilege of communicating their own feel- 
ings, and it is their talent to interest us, whether 
with their pen they talk of themselves, or paint 
others. 

In the history of men of genius let us not 
neglect those who have devoted themselves to 
the cultivation of the fine arts ; with them genius 
is alike insulated in their studies ; they pass 
through the same permanent discipline. The his- 
tories of literature and art have parallel epochs ; 
and certain artists resemble certain authors. — 
Hence Milton, Michael Angelo, and Handel* 
One principle unites the intellectual arts, for 



16 OxN LITERARY CHARACTERS. 

in one principle they originate, and thus it has 
happened that the same habits and feelings, and 
the same fortunes have accompanied men who 
have sometimes, unhappily, imagined that their 
pursuits were not analogous. In the " world of 
ear and eye," the poet, the painter, and the musi- 
cian are kindled by the same inspiration. Thus 
all is Art and all are artists ! This approxima- 
tion of men apparently of opposite pursuits is 
so natural, that when Gesner, in his inspiring 
letter on landscape-painting, recommends to the 
young painter a constant study of poetry and 
literature, the impatient artist is made to ex- 
claim, " Must we combine with so many other 
studies those which belong to literary men? 
Must we read as well as paint ?" " It is useless 
to reply to this question," says Gesner, " for some 
important truths must be instinctively felt, per- 
haps the fundamental ones in the arts." A truly 
imaginative artist, whose enthusiasm was never 
absent when he meditated on the art he loved, 
Barry, thus vehemently broke forth — " Go home 
from the Academy, light up your lamps, arid 
exercise yourselves in the creative part of your 
art, with Homer, with Livy; and all the great 
characters, ancient and modern, for your com- 
panions and counsellors." 



ON LITERARY CHARACTERS. 17 

Every life of a man of genius, composed by 
himself, presents us with the experimental phi- 
losophy of the mind. By living with their bro- 
thers, and contemplating on .their masters, they 
will judge from consciousness less erroneously 
than from discussion ; and in forming compara- 
tive views and parallel situations, they will dis- 
cover certain habits and feelings, and find these 
reflected in themselves. 



B-2 



( 18) 



CHAPTER II. 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 



Genius, that creative part of art which indivi- 
dualises the artist, belonging to him and to no 
other, — is it an inherent faculty in the constitu- 
tional dispositions of the individual, or can it be 
formed by the patient acquisitions of art 1 

Many sources of genius have indeed been laid 
open to us, but if these may sometimes call it 
forth, have they ever supplied its want ? Could 
Spenser have struck out a poet in Cowley, 
Richardson a painter in Reynolds, and Descartes 
a metaphysician in Mallebranche, had they not 
borne that vital germ of nature, which, when 
endowed with its force, is always developing 
itself to a particular character of genius ? The 
accidents related of these men have occurred to 
a thousand, who have run the same career ; but 
how does it happen, that the multitude remain a 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 19 

multitude, and the man of genius arrives alone 
at the goal ? 

The equality of minds in their native state 
is as monstrous a paradox, or a term as equivocal 
in metaphysics, as the equality of men in the 
political state. Both come from the French 
school in evil times; and ought, therefore, as 
Job said, " to be eschewed." Nor can we trust 
to Johnson's definition of genius, " as a mind of 
general powers accidentally determined by some 
particular direction," as this rejects any native 
aptitude, while we must infer on this principle 
that the reasoning Locke, without an ear or 
an eye, could have been the musical and fairy 
Spenser. 

The automatic theory of Reynolds stirs the 
puppet artist by the wires of pertinacious labour. 
But industry without genius is tethered ; it has 
stimulated many drudges in art, while it has left 
us without a Corregio or a Raphael. 

Akenside in that fine poem which is itself a 
history of genius, in tracing its source, first 
sang, 

From heaven my strains begin, from heaven descends 
The flame of genius to the human brtast. 



20 YOUTH OF GENHJS. 

but in the final revision of that poem he left 
many years after, the bard has vindicated the 
solitary and independent origin of genius by the 
mysterious epithet the chosen breast. The vete- 
ran poet was perhaps lessoned by the vicissitudes 
of his own poetical life, and those of some of his 
brothers. 

But while genius remains still wrapt up in its 
mysterious bud, may we not trace its history in 
its votaries? Let us compare although we may 
not always decide. If nature in some of her 
great operations .has kept her last secrets, and 
even Newton, in the result of his reasonings, 
has religiously abstained from penetrating into 
her occult connections, is it nothing to be her 
historian, although we cannnot be her legislator ? 

Can we trace in the faint lines of childhood, 
an unsteady outline of the man ? In the tem- 
perament of genius may we not reasonably look 
for certain indications, or prognostics announcing 
the permanent character ? Will not great sensibil- 
ity be born with its susceptible organization ; the 
deep retired character cling to its musings ; and 
the unalterable being of intrepidity and fortitude, 
full of confidence, be commanding even in his 
sports, a daring leader among his equals ? 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 21 

The virtuous and contemplative Boyle imagin- 
ed that he had discovered in childhood that dis- 
position of mind which indicated an instinctive 
ingenuousness ; an incident which he relates, 
evinced as he thought, that even then he pre- 
ferred aggravating his fault, rather than consent 
to suppress any part of the truth, an effort which 
had been unnatural to his mind. His fanciful, 
yet striking illustration may open our inquiry. 
" This trivial passage" — the little story alluded 
to — " I have mentioned now, not that I think 
that in itself it deserves a relation, but because 
as the sun is seen best at his rising and his set- 
ting, so men's native dispositions are clearliest 
perceived whilst they are children, and when 
they are dying. These little sudden actions are 
the greatest discoverers of men's true humours." 
That the dispositions of genius in early life pre- 
sage its future character, was long the feeling of 
antiquity. Isocrates, after much previous obser- 
vation of those who attended his lectures, would 
advise one to engage in political studies, exhort- 
ed another to compose history, elected some to 
be poets, and some to adopt his own profession. 
He thought that nature had some concern in 
forming a man of genius ; and he tried to guess 
at her secret by detecting the first energetic 



22 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

inclination of the mind. This principle guided 
the Jesuits. 



In the old romance of King Arthur, when a 
cowherd comes to the king to request he would 
make his son a knight — " It is a great thing thou 
askest," said Arthur, wiio inquired whether this 
entreaty proceeded from him or his son ? The 
old man's answer is remarkable — " Of my son, 
not of me ; for I have thirteen sons, and all 
these will fall to that labour I put them ; but this 
child will not labour for me, for any thing that 
I and my wife will do ; but always he will be 
shooting and casting darts, and glad for to see 
battles, and to behold knights, and always day 
and night he desireth of me to be made a knight." 
The king commanded the cowherd to fetch all 
his sons ; they were all shapen much like the 
poor man ; but Tor was not like none of them in 
shape and in countenance, for he was much more 
than any of them. And so Arthur knighted him." 
This simple tale is the history of genius — the 
cowherd's twelve sons were like himself, but the 
unhappy genius in the family who perplexed and 
plagued the cowherd and his wife and his twelve 
brothers, was the youth averse to labour, but ac- 
tive enough in performing knightly exercises ; 
and dreaming on chivalry amidst a herd of cows. 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 23 

A man of genius is thus dropt among the peo- 
ple, and has first to encounter the difficulties of 
ordinary men deprived of that feeble ductility 
which adapts itself to the common destination. 
Parents are too often the victims of the decided 
propensity of a son to a Virgil or an Euclid ; and 
the first step into life of a man of genius is diso- 
bedience and grief. Lilly, our famous astrologer, 
has described the frequent situation of such a 
youth, like the cowherd's son who would be a 
knight. Lilly proposed to his father that he 
should try his fortune in the metropolis, where 
he expected that his learning and his talents 
would prove serviceable to him ; the father, quite 
incapable of discovering the latent genius of his 
son in his studious dispositions, very willingly 
consented to get rid of him, for, as Lilly proceeds, 
" I could not work, drive the plough, or endure 
any country labour ; my father oft would say I 
was good for nothing," — words which the fathers 
of so many men of genius have repeated. 

In reading the memoirs of a man of genius we 
often reprobate the domestic persecutions of those 
who opposed his inclinations. No poet but is 
moved with indignation at the recollection of 
the Port Royal Society thrice burning the ro- 
mance which Racine at length got by heart ; no 



24 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

geometrician but bitterly inveighs against the 
father of Pascal for not suffering him to study 
Euclid, which he at length understood without 
studying. The father of Petrarch in a babarous 
rage burnt the poetical library of his son amidst 
the shrieks, the groans, and the tears of the 
youth. Yet this neither converted Petrarch into 
a sober lawyer, nor deprived him of the Roman 
laurel. The uncle of Alfieri for more than 
twenty years suppressed the poetical character of 
this noble bard ; he was a poet without knowing 
to write a verse, and Nature, like a hard creditor, 
exacted with redoubled interest, all the genius 
which the uncle had so long kept from her. Such 
are the men whose inherent impulse no human 
opposition, and even no adverse education, can 
deter from being great men. 

Let us, however, be just to the parents of a 
man of genius ; they have another association 
of ideas concerning him than we ; we see a great 
man, they a disobedient child; we track him 
through his glory, they are wearied by the 
sullen resistance of his character. The career of 
genius is rarely that of fortune or happiness ; 
and the father, who may himself be not insensi- 
ble to glory, dreads lest his son be found among 
that obscure multitude, that populace of mean 



YOUTH OF GENIUS, 25 

artists, who must expire at the barriers of medi* 
ocrity* 

The contemplative race, even in their first steps 
towards nature, are receiving that secret instruc- 
tion which no master can impart. The boy of 
genius flies to some favourite haunt to which 
his fancy has often given a name ; he populates 
his solitude; he takes all shapes in it, he finds 
all places in it; he converses silently with all 
about him — he is a hermit, a lover, a hero. The 
fragrance and blush of the morning; the still 
hush of the evening ; the mountain, the valley, 
and the stream ; all nature opening to him, 
he sits brooding over his first dim images, in that 
train of thought we call reverie, with a restless- 
ness of delight, for he is only the being of sensa- 
tion, and has not yet learnt to think ; then comes 
that tenderness of spirit, that first shade of thought, 
colouring every scene, and deepening every feel- 
ing ; this temperament has been often mistaken 
for melancholy. One, truly inspired, unfolds the 
secret story — 

■ Indowed with all that nature can bestow* 
The child of fancy oft irji silence bends 
O'er the mixt treasures of his pregnant breast 
With conscious pride. From them he oft resolves 
To frame he knows not what excelling things, 



26 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

And win he knows not what sublime reward 
Of praise and wonder" — 

This delight in reverie has been finely described 
by Boyle : " When the intermission of my stu- 
dies allowed me leisure for recreation," says 
Boyle, " I would very often steal away from all 
company, and spend four or five hours alone in 
the fields and think at random, making my delight- 
ed imagination the busy scene where some ro- 
mance or other was daily acted." This circum- 
stance alarmed his friends, who imagined that he 
was overcome with melancholy.* 



* An unhappy young man who recently forfeited his life to 
the laws for forgery appears to have given promises of genius. 
— He had thrown himself for two years into the studious re- 
tirement of a foreign university. Before his execution he 
sketched an imperfect auto-biography, and the following pas- 
sage is descriptive of young genius : 

" About this time I became uncommonly reserved, with- 
drawing by degrees from the pastimes of my associates, and 
was frequently observed to retire to some solitary place alone. 
Ruined castles, bearing the vestiges of ancient broils, and the 
impairing hand of time, — cascades thundering through the 
echoing groves, — rocks and precipices, — the beautiful as well 
as the sublime traits of nature — formed a spacious field for 
contemplation many a happy hour. From these inspiring ob- 
jects, contemplation would lead me to the great Author oi 
nature. Often have I dropped on my knees, and poured oul 
the ecstasies of my soul to the God who inspired thern." 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 27 

It is remarkable that this love of repose and 
musing is retained throughout life. A man of 
fine genius is rarely enamoured of common 
amusements or of robust exercises ; and he is 
usually unadroit where dexterity of hand or eye, 
or trivial elegancies, are required. This charac- 
teristic of genius was discovered by Horace in 
that Ode which school-boys often versify.* 
Beattie has expressly told us of his Minstrel — 

" The exploit of strength, dexterity, or speed 
To him nor vanity, nor joy could bring." 

Allien said he could never be taught by a French 
dancing-master, whose Art made him at once 
shudder and laugh. If we reflect that as it is 
now practised it seems the art of giving affec- 
tation to a puppet, and that this puppet is a man 
we can enter into this mixed sensation of degra- 
dation and ridicule. Horace, by his own confes- 
sion, was a very awkward rider; and the poetical 
rider could not always secure a seat on his mule ; 
Metastasio humorously complains of his gun ;the 
poetical sportsman could only frighten the hares 
and partridges ; the truth was, as an elder poet 
sings, 

" Instead of hounds that make the wooded hills 
Talk in a hunded voices to the rills, 

*Hor. Od. Lib, iv. 0.3, 



28 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

I like the pleasiug cadence of a line 
Struck by the concert of the sacred Nine." 

Browne's Brit. Past. B. ii. Song 4. 

And we discover the true "humour" of the 
indolent contemplative race in their great repre- 
sentatives Virgil and Horace. When they ac- 
companied Mecaenas into the country, while the 
minister amused himself at tennis, the two bards 
reposed on a vernal bank amidst the freshness of 
the shade. The younger Pliny, who was so per- 
fect a literary character, was charmed by the 
Roman mode of hunting, or rather fowling by 
nets, which admitted him to sit a whole day with 
his tablets and stylus, that, says he, " should I re- 
turn with empty nets my tablets may at least be 
full." Thomson was the hero of his own Castle 
of Indolence. 

The youth of genius will be apt to retire from 
the active sports of his mates. Beattie paints 
himself in his own Minstrel, 

" Concourse and noise, and toil he ever fled, 
Nor cared to mingle in the clamorous fray 
Of squabbling imps; but to the forest sped." 

Bos suet would not join his young companions, 
and flew to his solitary task, while the classical 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 29 

boys avenged his flight by applying to him from 
Virgil the bos suetus aratro, the ox daily toil- 
ing in the plough. The young painters, to ridi- 
cule the persevering labours of Domenichino in 
his youth, honoured him by the same title of 
" the great ox ;" and Passeri, in his delightful 
biography of his own contemporary artists, has 
happily expressed the still labours of his conceal- 
ed genius, sua tacituma lentezza, his silent slow- 
ness. The learned Huet has given an amusing 
detail of the inventive persecutions of his school- 
mates, to divert him from his obstinate love of 
study. " At length," says he, " in order to indulge 
my own taste, I would rise with the sun, while 
they were buried in sleep, and hide myself in the 
woods that I might read and study in quiet," but 
they beat the bushes and started in his burrow, 
the future man of erudition. Sir William Jones 
was rarely a partaker in the active sports of Har- 
row ; it was said of Gray that he was never a 
boy, and the unhappy Chatterton and Burns were 
remarkably serious boys. Milton has preserved 
for us, in solemn numbers, his school-life — 

a When I was yet a child, no childish play- 
To me was pleasing ; all my mind was set 
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do 
What might be public good, myself I thought 
c 2 



30 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

Born to that end, born to promote all truth, 
All righteous things — 

Par. Reg. 



If the youth of genius is apt to retire from the 
ordinary sports of his mates, he often substitutes 
others, the reflections of those favourite studies 
which are haunting his young imagination ; the 
amusements of such an idler have often been 
fanciful. Ariosto, while yet a school-boy, 
composed a sort of tragedy from the story of 
Pyramus and Thisbe, and had it represented 
by his brothers and sisters. Pope seems to 
have indicated his passion for Homer in those 
rough scenes which he drew up from Ogilby's 
version ; and when Sir William Jones at Har- 
row divided the fields according to a map of 
Greece, and portioned out to each school-fellow 
a dominion, and further, when wanting a copy of 
the Tempest to act from, he supplied it from his 
memory, we must confess that the boy Jones Avas 
reflecting in his amusements the cast of mind he 
displayed in his after-life, and that felicity of 
memory and taste so prevalent in his literary 
character. Florian's earliest years were passed 
in shooting birds all day and reading every even- 
ing an old translation of the Iliad ; whenever he 
got a bird remarkable for its size or its plumage, 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 3X 

fee personified it by one of the names of his he- 
roes, and raising a funeral pyre consumed the 
body ; collecting the ashes in an urn, he present- 
ed them to his grandfather, with a narrative of 
his Patroclus or Sarpedon. We seem here to 
detect, reflected in his boyish sports, the pleasing 
genius of the author of Numa Pompilius, Gon- 
salvo of Cordova and William Tell. 

It is perhaps a criterion of talent when a youth 
is distinguished by his equals; at that moment of 
life with no flattery on the one side, and no arti- 
fice on the other, all emotion and no reflection, 
the boy who has obtained a predominance has 
acquired this merely by native powers. The 
boyhood of Nelson was characterized by events 
congenial to those of his after-days; and his 
father understood his character when he declared 
that " in whatever station he might be placed, 
he would climb, if possible, to the top of the 
tree." Some puerile anecdotes which Frank- 
lin remembered of himself, in association with 
his after-life, betray the invention, and the 
firm intrepidity, of his character ; and even per- 
haps the carelessness of the means to obtain his 
purpose. In boyhood he was a sort of adven- 
turer; and since his father would not consent 
to a sea-life, he made the river near him repre- 



32 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

sent the ocean ; he lived on the water, and was 
the daring Columbus of a school-boy's boat. 
A part where he and his mates stood to angle, 
in time became a quagmire. In the course 
of one day the infant projector thought of a 
wharf for them to stand on, and raised with a 
heap of stones deposited there for the building 
of a house. But he preferred his wharf to 
another's house ; his contrivances to aid his 
puny labourers, with his resolution not to quit 
the great work till it was effected, seem to 
strike out to us the decision and invention of 
his future character. But the qualities which 
attract the companions of a school-boy may 
not be those which are essential to fine genius. 
The captain or leader of his school-mates has 
a claim on our attention, but it is the sequestered 
boy who may chance to be the artist, or the 
literary character. 

Is there then a period in youth which yield s 
decisive marks of the character of genius? The 
natures of men are as various as their fortunes. 
Some, like diamonds, must wait to receive their 
splendour from the slow touches of the polisher, 
while others, resembling pearls, appear at once 
born with their beautiful lustre. 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 33 

Among the inauspicious circumstances is the 
feebleness of the first attempts ; and we must not 
decide on the talents of a young man by his first 
works. Dryden and Swift might have been de- 
terred from authorship, had their earliest pieces 
decided their fate. Racine's earliest composition, 
which we know of by some fragments his son 
has preserved, to show their remarkable contrast 
with his writings, abound with those points and 
conceits which afterwards he abhorred ; the 
tender author of Andromache could not have 
been discovered while exhausting himself in his 
wanderings from nature, in running after con- 
ceits as absurd and surprizing as the worst parts 
of Cowley. Gibbon betrayed none of the force 
and magnitude of his powers in his " Essay on 
Literature," or his attempted History of Switzer- 
land. Johnson's cadenced prose is not recog- 
nizable in the humble simplicity of his earliest 
years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully 
the walk they afterwards excelled in. Raphael, 
when he first drew his meagre forms under Peru- 
gino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal 
beauty, which one day he of all men could alone 
execute. 

Even the manhood of genius may pass by un- 
observed by his companions, and may, like iEneas, 



34 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

be hidden in a cloud amidst his associates. The 
celebrated Fabius Maximus in his boyhood was 
called in derision " the little sheep," from the 
meekness and gravity of his disposition. His se- 
dateness and taciturnity, his indifference to juve- 
nile amusements, his slowness and difficulty in 
learning, and his ready submission to his equals, 
induced them to consider him as one irrecover- 
ably stupid. That greatness of mind, unalterable 
courage, and invincible character Fabius after- 
wards displayed, they then imagined had lain con- 
cealed in the apparent contrary qualities. The 
boy of genius may indeed seem slow and dull 
even to the phlegmatic, for thoughtful and ob- 
serving dispositions conceal themselves in timor- 
ous silent characters, who have not yet learnt 
their strength ; nor can that assiduous love, which 
cannot tear itself away from the secret instruction 
it is perpetually imbibing, be easily distinguished 
from that pertinacity which goes on with the mere 
plodder. We often hear from the early compan- 
ions of a man of genius that at school, he had ap- 
peared heavy and unpromising. Rousseau ima- 
gined that the childhood of some men is accom- 
panied by that seeming and deceitful dullness, 
which is the sign of a profound genius ; and 
Roger Ascham has placed among " the best na- 
tures for learning, the sad-natured and hard-wit- 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 35 

ted child," that is, the thoughtful or the melan- 
cholic, and the slow. Domenichino was at first 
heavy and unpromising, and Passeri expresses his 
surprize at the accounts he received of the early 
life of this great artist. " It is difficult to be- 
lieve," he says, " what many assert, that from the 
beginning this great painter had a ruggedness 
about him, which entirely incapacitated him from 
learning his profession, and they have heard from 
himself that he quite despaired of success. Yet 
I cannot comprehend how such vivacious talents, 
with a mind so finely organised, and accompanied 
with such favourable dispositions for the art, 
would show such signs of utter incapacity ; I ra- 
ther think that it is a mistake in the proper know- 
ledge of genius, which some imagine indicates 
itself most decisively by its sudden vehemence, 
showing itself like lightning, and like lightning 
passing away." A parallel case we find in Gold- 
smith, who passed through an unpromising youth ; 
he declared that he was never attached to the 
belles lettres till he was thirty, that poetry had no 
peculiar charms for him till that age, and indeed 
to his latest hour he was surprizing his friends by 
productions which they had imagined he was in- 
capable of composing. Hume was considered, 
for his sobriety and assiduity, as competent to be- 
come a steady merchant ; of Johnson it was said 



36 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

that he would never offend in conversation, as of 
Boileau that he had no great understanding, but 
would speak ill of no one. Farquhar at college 
was a heavy companion, and afterwards, com- 
bined, with great knowledge of the world, a light 
airy talent. Even a discerning parent or master 
has entirely failed to develope the genius of the 
youth, who has afterwards ranked among eminent 
men ; and we ought as little to infer from early 
Unfavourable appearances as from inequality of 
talent. The great Isaac Barrow's father used to 
say, that if it pleased God to take from him any 
of his children he hoped it might be Isaac, as the 
least promising ; and during the three years Bar- 
row passed at the Charter-house, he was remark- 
able only for the utter negligence of his studies 
and his person. The mother of Sheridan, her- 
self a literary female, pronounced early, that he 
was the dullest and most hopeless of her sons. 
Bodmer, at the head of the literary class in 
Switzerland, who had so frequently discovered 
and animated the literary youths of his country, 
could never detect the latent genius of Gesner ; 
after a repeated examination of the young man, 
he put his parents in despair with the hopeless 
award that a mind of so ordinary a cast must con- 
fine itself to mere writing and aecompts* 



TOUTH OF GENIUS. 37 

Thus it happens that the first years of life do 
not always include those of genius, and the edu- 
cation of the youth may not be the education of 
his genius. In all these cases nature had dropt 
the seeds in the soil, but even a happy disposition 
must be concealed amidst adverse circumstances. 
It has happened to some men of genius during a 
long period of their lives, that an unsettled im- 
pulse, without having discovered the object of its 
aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of 
too sentient a being which cannot find the occu- 
pation to which it can only attach itself, has sunk 
into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary 
with the burthen of existence ; but the instant the 
latent talent had declared itself, his first work, the 
eager offspring of desire and love, has astonished 
the world at once with the birth and the maturity 
of genius. * 

Abundant facts exhibit genius unequivocally 
discovering itself in the juvenile age, connecting 
these facts with the subsequent life — and in ge- 
neral, perhaps a master-mind exhibits precocity. 
" Whatever a young man at first applies himself 
to, is commonly his delight afterwards." This 
remark was made by Hartley, who has related an 
anecdote of the infancy of his genius, which in- 
dicated the man. He declared to his daughter 

D 



38 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

that the intention of writing a book upon the na- 
ture of man was conceived in his mind when he 
was a very little boy — when swinging backwards 
and forwards upon a gate, not more than nine 
or ten years old ; he was then meditating upon 
the nature of his own mind, how man was made, 
and for what future end — such was the true ori- 
gin, in a boy of ten years old, of his celebrated 
book on the " frame, the duty and the expectation 
of man." The constitutional propensity has de- 
clared itself in painters and poets, who were such 
before they understood the nature of colours and 
the arts of verse. The vehement passion of 
Peiresc for knowledge, according to accounts 
Gassendi had received from old men who had 
known him a child, broke out as soon as he had 
been taught his alphabet ; his delight was to be 
handling books and papers, and his perpetual in- 
quiries after their contents obliged them to invent 
something to quiet the child's insatiable curiosity, 
who was offended if told he had not the capacity 
to understand them. He did not study like ordi- 
nary scholars, and would read neither Justin nor 
Ovid without a perpetual consultation of other 
authors, such was his early love of research ! At 
ten years of age his taste for the studies of anti- 
quity was kindled at the sight of some ancient 
coins dug up in his neighbourhood 5 and then that 



TOUTH OF GENIUS. %$ 

passion for knowledge " began to burn like fire in 
a forest," as Gassendi most happily describes the 
fervour and the amplitude of his mind. We have 
Boccaccio's own words for a proof of his early- 
natural tendency to tale-writing, in a passage of 
his genealogy of the Gods : " Before seven years 
of age, when as yet I had met with no stories, 
was without a master and hardly knew my letters, 
I had a natural talent for fiction, and produced 
some little tales." Thus the Decamerone was 
appearing much earlier than we suppose. So 
Ariosto, as soon as he obtained some knowledge 
of languages, delighted himself in translating 
French and Spanish romances ; was he not sow- 
ing plentifully the seeds of his Orlando Furioso ? 
Lope de Vega declares that he was a poet from 
the cradle, beginning to make verses before he 
could write them, for he bribed his school-mates 
with a morsel of his breakfast to write down the 
lines he composed in the early morning. Des- 
cartes, while yet a boy, was so marked out by 
habits of deep meditation, that he went among 
his companions by the title of the philosopher, 
always questioning, and settling cause and effect. 
It happened that he was twenty-five years of age 
before he left the army, but the propensity for 
meditation had been early formed, and the noble 
enterprize of reforming philosophy never ceased 



40 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

to inspire his solitary thoughts. Descartes was a 
man born only for meditation— and he has himself 
given a very interesting account of the pursuits 
which occupied his youth, and of the progress of 
his genius ; of that secret struggle he so long held 
with himself, wandering in concealment over the 
world, for more than twenty years, and, as he 
says of himself, like the statuary, labouring to 
draw out a Minerva from the marble block. Mi- 
chael Angelo, as yet a child, wherever he went, 
busied himself in drawing ; and when his noble 
parents, hurt that a man of genius was disturbing 
the line of their ancestry, forced him to relinquish 
the pencil, the infant artist flew to the chissel : 
art was in his soul and his hands. Velasquez, the 
Spanish painter, at his school-tasks, filled them 
with sketches and drawings, and as some write 
their names on their books, his were known by 
the specimens of his genius. The painter Lan- 
franco was originally the page of a marquis, who 
observing that he was perpetually scrawling figures 
on cards, or with charcoal on the walls, asked the 
boy whether he would apply to the art he seemed 
to love ? The boy trembled, fearing to have in- 
curred his master's anger ; but when encouraged 
to decide, he did not hesitate : placed under one 
of the Carraccios, his rapid progress in the art 
testified how much Lanfranco had suffered by sup- 






YOUTH OF GENIUS. 41 

pressing his natural aptitude. When we find the 
boy Nanteuil, his parents being averse to their 
son's practising drawing, hiding himself in a tree 
to pursue the delightful exercise of his pencil ; 
that Handel, intended for a doctor of the civil 
laws, and whom no parental discouragement could 
deprive of his enthusiasm for the musical science, 
for ever touching harpsichords, and having se- 
cretly conveyed a musical instrument to a retired 
apartment, sitting through the night awakening 
his harmonious spirit ; and when we view Fergu- 
son, the child of a peasant, acquiring the art of 
reading without any one suspecting it, by listening 
to his father teaching his brother; making a 
wooden watch without the slightest knowledge of 
mechanism, and while a shepherd, like an ancient 
Chaldean, studying the phenomena of the hea- 
vens and making a celestial globe, as he had 
made a wooden watch, can we hesitate to believe 
that in such minds, there was a resistless and mys- 
terious propensity, growing up with the tempera- 
ment of these artists ? Ferguson was a shepherd- 
lad on a plain, placed entirely out of the chance 
of imitation ; or of the influence of casual excite- 
ment ; or any other of those sources of genius so 
frequently assigned for its production. The case 
of Opie is similar. 

d 2 



42 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

Yet these cases are not more striking than one 
related of the Abbe La Caille, who ranked among 
the first astronomers of the age. La Caille was 
the son of the parish clerk of a village ; at the 
age of ten years his father sent him every even- 
ing to ring the church bell, but the boy always 
returned home late. His father was angry and 
beat him, and still the boy returned an hour after 
he had rung the bell. The father, suspecting 
something mysterious in his conduct, one evening 
watched him. He saw his son ascend the steeple, 
ring the bell as usual, and remain there during an 
hour. When the unlucky boy descended, he 
trembled like one caught in the fact, and on his 
knees confessed that the pleasure he took in 
watching the stars from the steeple was the real 
cause of detaining him from home. As the fa- 
ther was not born to be an astronomer, like the 
son, he flogged the boy severely. The youth 
was found weeping in the streets, by a man of 
science, who, when he discovered in a boy of ten 
years of age, a passion for contemplating the . 
stars at night, and who had discovered an obser- 
vatory in a steeple, in spite of such ill-treatment, 
he decided that the seal of nature had impressed 
itself on the genius of that boy. — Relieving the 
parent from the son and the son from the parent, 
he assisted the young La Caille in his passionate 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 43 

pursuit, and the event completely justified the 
prediction. Let others tell us why children feel 
a predisposition for the studies of astronomy, or 
natural history, or any similar pursuit. We 
know that youths have found themselves in par- 
allel situations with Ferguson and La Caille, with- 
out experiencing their energies. 

The case of Clairon, the great French tragic 
actress, deserves attention: she seems to have 
been an actress before she saw a theatre. This 
female, destined to be a sublime actress, was of 
the lowest extraction ; the daughter of a violent 
and illiterate woman, who with blows and me- 
naces was driving about the child all day to 
manual labour. li I know not," says Clairon, 
" whence I derived my disgust, but I could not 
bear the idea to be a mere workman, or to 
remain inactive in a comer." In her eleventh 
year, being locked up in a room, as a punish- 
ment, with the windows fastened, she climbed 
upon a chair to look about her. A new object in- 
stantly absorbed her attention ; in the house oppo- 
site she observed a celebrated actress amidst her 
family, her daughter was performing her dancing 
lesson ; the girl Clairon, the future Melpomene, 
was struck by the influence of this graceful and 
affectionate scene. " All my little being collect- 



44 YOUTH OF GENltfS. 

ed itself into my eyes ; I lost not a single motion ; 
as soon as the lesson ended all the family applaud- 
ed and the mother embraced the daughter. — 
That difference of her fate and mine rilled me 
with profound grief, my tears hindered me from 
seeing any longer, and when the palpitations of 
my heart allowed me to reascend the chair, all 
had disappeared." This was a discovery ; from 
that moment she knew no rest; she rejoiced 
when she could get her mother to confine her 
in that room. The happy girl was a divinity to 
the unhappy one, whose susceptible genius imita- 
ted her in every gesture and motion ; and Cla- 
iron soon showed the effect of her ardent stu- 
dies, for she betrayed all the graces she had taught 
herself, in the common intercourse of life; she 
charmed her friends and even softened her bar- 
barous mother; in a word, she was an actress 
without knowing what an actress was. 

In this case of the youth of genius, are we to 
conclude that the accidental view of a young 
actress practising her studies, imparted the char- 
acter of the great tragic actress Clairon ? Could a 
mere chance occurrence have given birth to those 
faculties which produced a sublime tragedian ? In 
all arts there are talents which may be acquired 
by imitation, and reflection; and thus far may 



YOUTH OF GENIUS. 45 

genius be educated, but there are others which 
are entirely the result of native sensibility, which 
often secretly torment the possessor, and which 
may even be lost from the want of development ; 
a state of languor from which many have not re- 
covered. Clairon, before she saw the young ac- 
tress, and having yet no conception of a theatre, 
never having entered one, had in her soul that 
latent faculty which creates a genius of her cast. 
" Had I not felt like Dido," she once exclaimed, 
" 1 could not have thus personified her !" 

Some of these facts, we conceive, afford deci- 
sive evidence of that instinct in genius, that 
constitutional propensity in the mind, sometimes 
called organization, which has inflamed such a 
war of words by its equivocal term and the 
ambiguity of its nature ; it exists independent of 
education, and where it is wanting, education can 
never confer it. Of its mysterious influence we 
may be ignorant; the effect i s mor apparent 
than the cause. It is, however, always working 
in the character of the chosen mind. In the his- 
tory of genius, there are unquestionably many 
secondary causes of considerable influence in 
developing or even crushing the germ— these 
have been of late often detected, and sometimes 



46 YOUTH OF GENIUS. 

carried even to a ridiculous extreme ; but among 
them none seem more remarkable than the first 
studies and the first habits. 



(47 J 



CHAPTER III. 



THE FIRST STUDIES. 



The first studies form an epoch in the history 
of genius, and unquestionably have sensibly in- 
fluenced its productions. Often have the first 
impressions stamped a character on the mind 
adapted to receive one, as often the first step 
into life has determined its walk. To our- 
selves, this is a distant period lost in the horizon 
of our own recollection, and so unobserved by 
others, that it passes away in neglect. 

Many of those peculiarities of men of genius 
which are not fortunate, and some which have 
hardened the character in its mould, may be 
traced to this period. Physicians tell us that 
there is a certain point in youth at which the 
constitution is formed, and on which the sanity 
of life revolves; the character of genius expe- 
riences a similar dangerous period. Early bad 



48 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

tastes, early particular habits, early defective 
instructions, all the egotistical pride of an un- 
tamed intellect, are those evil spirits which will 
dog genius, to its grave. An early attachment 
to the works of Sir Thomas Browne produced 
in Johnson an excessive admiration of that lati- 
nised English, which violated the native graces 
of the language. The first studies of Rem- 
brandt affected his after-labours ; that pecu- 
liarity of shadow which marks all his pictures 
originated in the circumstance of his father's 
mill receiving light from an aperture at the top, 
which habituated that artist afterwards to view 
all objects as if seen in that magical light When 
Pope was a child he found in his mother's closet 
a small library of mystical devotion; but it was 
not suspected till the fact was discovered, that 
the effusions of loye and religion poured forth 
in his Eloisa were derived from the seraphic 
raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the 
last retained a place in his library among the 
classical bards of antiquity. The accidental pe- 
rusal of Quintus Curtius first made Boyle " in 
love with other than pedantic books, and con- 
jured up in him," as he expresses it, " an un- 
satisfied appetite of knowledge ; so that he 
thought he owed more to Quintus Curtius than 
did Alexander." From the perusal of Rycaut's 



THE FIRST STUDIES. 49 

folio of Turkish history in childhood, the noble 
and impassioned bard of our times retained 
those indelible impressions, which gave life and 
motion to the " Giaour," the " Corsair," and 
" Alp." A voyage to the country produced the 
scenery. Rycaut only communicated the im- 
pulse to a mind susceptible of the poetical char- 
acter ; and without this Turkish history we should 
still have had our poet. 

The influence of first studies, in the formation 
of the character of genius, is a moral pheno- 
menon, which has not sufficiently attracted our 
notice. Dr. Franklin acquaints us that when 
young and wanting books, he accidentally found 
De Foe's "Essay on Projects," from which 
work impressions were derived which afterwards 
influenced some of the principal events of his 
life. Rousseau, in early youth, full of his 
Plutarch, while he was also devouring the trash 
of romances, could only conceive human nature 
in the colossal forms, or be affected by the infirm 
sensibility, of an imagination mastering all his 
faculties ; thinking like a Roman, and feeling like 
a Sybarite. The same circumstance happened 
to Catharine Macauley, who herself has told us 
how she owed the bent of her character to the 
early reading of the Roman historians: but 



£0 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

combining Roman admiration with English fac- 
tion, she violated truth in her English charac- 
ters, and exaggerated romance in the Roman. 
But the permanent effect of a solitary bias in 
the youth of genius, impelling the whole current 
of his after-life, is strikingly displayed in the 
remarkable character of Archdeacon Blackburne, 
the author of the famous " Confessional," and 
the curious " Memoirs of Hollis," written with 
such a republican fierceness. 

I had long considered the character of our 
archdeacon as a lusus politico et theologico. 
Having subscribed to the Articles and enjoying 
the archdeaconry, he was writing against sub- 
scription and the whole hierarchy, with a spirit 
so irascible and caustic, as if, like Prynne and 
Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost both 
his ears ; while his antipathy to monarchy might 
have done honour to a Roundhead of the Rota 
Club. The secret of these volcanic explosions 
was only revealed in a letter accidentally pre- 
served. In the youth of our spirited archdeacon, 
when fox-hunting was his deepest study, it hap- 
pened at the house of a relation, that on some 
rainy day, among other garret lumber, he fell 
on some worm eaten volumes which had once 
been the careful collections of his greatgrand- 



THE FIRST STUDIES. 51 

father, an Oliverian justice. " These," says he, 
"I conveyed to my lodging-room, and there 
became acquainted with the manners and prin- 
ciples of many excellent old puritans, and then 
laid the foundation of my own." Thus is the 
enigma solved! Archdeacon Blackburne, in his 
seclusion in Yorkshire amidst the Olive rian 
justice's library, shows that we are in want of 
a Cervantes, but not of a Quixote, and York- 
shire might yet be as renowned a county as 
La Mancha ; for political romances, it is presum- 
ed, may b« as fertile of ridicule as any of the 
folios of chivalry. 

Such is the influence through life of those first 
unobserved impressions on the character of geni- 
us, which every author has not recorded. 

Education, however indispensible in a culti- 
vated age, produces nothing on the side of geni- 
us, and where education ends often genius begins. 
Gray was asked if he recollected when he first 
felt the strong predilection to poetry ; he replied, 
that " he believed it was when he began to read 
Virgil for his own amusement, and not in school 
hours as a task." Such is the force of self-edu- 
cation in genius, that the celebrated physiologist, 
John Hunter, who was entirely self-educated, 



52 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

evinced such penetration in his anatomical dis- 
coveries, that his sensible biographer observes, — 
" he has brought into notice passages from writers 
he was unable to read, and which had been over- 
looked by profound scholars."* 

That the education of genius must be its own 
work, we may appeal to every one of the family ; 
it is not always fortunate, for many die amidst 
a waste of talents and the wrecks of their mind. 

Many a soul sublime 
Has felt the influence of malignant star. 

Beattie. 

An unfavourable position in society is an usual 
obstruction in the course of this self-education ; 
and a man of genius, through half his life, has 
held a contest with a bad, or with no education. 
There is a race of the late-taught, who, with a 
capacity of leading in the first rank, are mortified 
to discover themselves only on a level with their" 
contemporaries. Winkelman, who passed his 
youth in obscure misery, as a village schoolmaster, 
paints feelings which strikingly contrast with his 

* Life of John Hunter, by Dr. Adams, p. 59, where the case 
is curiously illustrated. 



THE FIRST STUDIES. 53 

avocations. " I formerly filled the office of a 
schoolmaster with the greatest punctuality, and I 
taught the A, B, C, to children with filthy heads ; 
at the moment, I was aspiring after the knowledge 
of the beautiful, and meditating, low to myself, 
on the similes of Homer ; then I said to my- 
self, as I still say, c Peace, my soul, thy strength 
shall surmount thy cares.'" The obstructions 
of so unhappy a self-education essentially inju- 
red his ardent genius ; and his secret sorrow was 
long, at this want of early patronage and these dis- 
cordant habits of life. " I am unfortunately one of 
those whom the Greeks named ozrtiuat$ets; sero 
sapientes, the late-learned, for I have appeared 
too late in the world and in Italy. To have done 
something, it was necessary that I should 
have had an education analogous to my pur- 
suits, and this at your age." This class of the 
late-learned, which Winkelman notices, is a useful 
distinction ; it is so with a sister-art : one of the 
greatest musicians of our country assures me, 
that the ear is as latent with many ; there are 
the late-learned even in the musical world. Bu- 
daeus declared he was both " self-taught and late- 
taught." 

The self-educated are marked by strong pecu- 
liarities. If their minds are rich in acquisition^ 

e 2 



54 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

they often want taste, and the art of communica- 
tion ; their knowledge, like corn heaped in a 
granary, for want of ventilation and stirring, per- 
ishes in its own masses. They may abound with 
talent in all shapes, but rarely in its place, and 
they have to dread a plethora of genius, and a 
delirium of wit. They sometimes improve amaz- 
ingly ; their source, turbid and obscure, works it- 
self clear at last, and the stream runs and even 
sparkles. These men at first were pushed on by 
their native energy ; at length, they obtain the 
secret to conduct their genius, which before had 
conducted them. Sometimes the greater portion 
of their lives is passed before they can throw 
themselves out of that world of mediocrity to 
which they had been confined ; their first work 
has not announced genius, and their last is stamp- 
ed with it. Men are long judged by their first 
work : it takes a long while after they have sur- 
passed themselves before it is discovered. This 
race of the self-educated are apt to consider some 
of their own insulated feelings those of all ; their 
prejudices are often invincible, and their tastes 
unsure and capricious ; glorying in their strength, 
while they are betraying their weaknesses, yet 
mighty even in that enthusiasm which is only dis- 
ciplined by its own fierce habits. Bunyan is the 



THE FIRST STUDIES, 55 

Spenser of the people. The fire burned towards 
heaven, although the altar was rude and rustic, 

Barry, the painter, has left behind him works 
not to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, 
nor the artist who dares not be just and will not 
suffer even the infirmities of genius to be buried 
in its grave. That enthusiast, with a temper of 
mind resembling Rousseau's, the same creature 
of imagination, consumed by the same passions, 
with the same fine intellect disordered, and the 
same fortitude of soul, found his self-taught pen, 
like his pencil, betray his genius. A vehement 
enthusiasm breaks through his ill-composed works, 
throwing the sparks of his bold and rich concep- 
tions, so philosophical and magnificent, into the 
soul of the youth of genius. When in his char- 
acter of professor, he delivered his lectures at 
the academy, he never ceased speaking but his 
auditors rose in a tumult, while their hands return- 
ed to him the proud feelings he adored. The 
self-educated and gifted man, once listening to 
the children of genius, whom he had created 
about him, exclaimed; " Go it, go it, my boys ! they 
did so at Athens." Thus high could he throw 
up his native mud into the very heaven of his in- 
vention ! 



56 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

But even the pages of Barry are the aliment 
of young genius : before we can discern the beau- 
tiful, must we not be endowed with the suscepti- 
bility of love ? Must not the disposition be form- 
ed before even the object appears ? The unedu- 
cated Barry is the higher priest of enthusiasm 
than the educated Reynolds. I have witnessed 
the young artist of genius glow and start over the 
reveries of Barry, but pause and meditate, and 
inquire over the mature elegance of Reynolds ; 
in the one, he caught the passion for beauty, and 
in the other, he discovered the beautiful ; with 
the one he was warm and restless, and with the 
other calm and satisfied. 

Of the difficulties overcome in the self-educa- 
tion of genius, we have a remarkable instance in 
the character of Moses Mendelsohn, on whom 
literary Germany has bestowed the honourable 
title of the Jewish Socrates.* Such were the ap- 

* I composed the life of Mendelsohn so far back as in 17 , 
for a periodical publication, whence our late biographers have 
drawn their notices ; a juvenile production, which happened to 
excite the attention of the late Barry, then not personally 
known to me, and he has given all the immortality his poeti- 
cal pencil could bestow on this man of genius, by immediate- 
ly placing in his elysium of genius, Moses Mendelsohn shak- 
ing hands with Addison, who wrote on the truth of the Chris- 
tian religion, and near Locke, the English master of Mendel- 
sohn's mind. 



THE FIRST STUDIES. 57 

parent invincible obstructions which barred out 
Mendelsohn from the world of literature and phi- 
losophy, that, in the history of men of genius, it 
is something like taking in the history of man, 
the savage of Aveyron from his woods, — who, 
destitute of a human language, should at length 
create a model of eloquence ; without a faculty 
of conceiving a figure, should be capable to add 
10 the demonstrations of Euclid ; and without a 
complex idea and with few sensations, should at 
length, in the sublimest strain of metaphysics, 
open to the world a new view of the immortality 
of the soul ! 

Mendelsohn, the son of a poor rabbin, in a 
village in Germany, received an education com- 
pletely rabbinical, and its nature must be compre- 
hended, or the term of education would be mis- 
understood. The Israelites in Poland 'and Ger- 
many live, with all the restrictions of their cere- 
monial law, in an insulated state, and are not al- 
ways instructed in the language of the country of 
their birth. They employ for their common in- 
tercourse a barbarous Or patois Hebrew, while 
the sole studies of the young rabbins are strictly 
confined to the Talmud, of which the fundamen- 
tal principle, like the Sonna of the Turks, is a 
pious rejection of every species of uninspired 



58 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

learning. This ancient jealous spirit, which walls 
in the understanding and the faith of man, was 
shutting out what the imitative Catholics after 
wards called heresy. It is, then, these numerous 
folios of the Talmud which the true Hebraic stu- 
dent contemplates through all the seasons of life, 
as the Patuecos in their low valley imagine their 
cnrrrmnrHng mountains to be the confines of the 
universe. 

Of such a nature was the plan of Mendel- 
sohn's first studies ; but even in his boyhood this 
conflict of study occasioned an agitation of his 
spirits, which affected his life ever after ; reject- 
ing the Talmudical dreamers he caught a nobler 
spirit from the celebrated Maimonides ; and his 
native sagacity was already clearing up the dark- 
ness around. An enemy not less hostile to the 
enlargement of mind than voluminous legends, 
presented itself in the indigence of his father, 
who was now compelled to send away the youth 
on foot to Berlin to find labour and bread. 

At Berlin he becomes an amanuensis to another 
poor rabbin, who could only still initiate him into 
the theology, the jurisprudence and scholastic 
philosophy of his people. Thus he was no far- 
ther advanced in that philosophy of the mind in 



THE FIRST STUDIES. £$ 

which he was one day to be the rival of Plato and 
Locke, nor in that knowledge of literature of 
which he was to be among the first polished cri- 
tics of Germany. 

Some unexpected event occurs which gives the 
first great impulse to the mind of genius. Men- 
delsohn received this from the first companion 
of his misery and his studies, a man of congenial, 
but maturer powers. He was a Polish Jew, ex- 
pelled from the communion of the Orthodox, 
and the calumniated student was now a vagrant, 
with more sensibility than fortitude. But this 
vagrant was a philosopher, a poet, a naturalist 
and a mathematician. Mendelsohn, at a distant 
day, never alluded to him without tears. Thrown 
together into the same situation, they approached 
each other by the same sympathies, and commu- 
nicating in the only language which Mendelsohn 
knew, the Polander voluntarily undertook his li- 
terary education. 

Then was seen one of the most extraordinary 
spectacles in the history of modern literature. 
Two houseless Hebrew youths might be discover- 
ed, in the moonlight streets of Berlin, sitting in 
retired corners, or on the steps of some porch, 
the one instructing the other, with an Euclid in 
his hand ', but what is more extraordinary, it was 




gO THE FIRST STUDIES. 

a Hebrew version, composed by himself, for one 
who knew no other language. Who could then 
have imagined that the future Plato of Germany 
was sitting on those steps ! 

The Poland er, whose deep melancholy had 
settled on his heart, died — yet he had not lived in 
vain, since the electric spark that lighted up the 
soul of Mendelsohn had fallen from his own. 

Mendelsohn was now left alone ; his mind 
teeming with its chaos, and still master of no other 
language than that barren idiom which was inca- 
pable of expressing the ideas he was meditating 
on. He had scarcely made a step into the philo- 
sophy of his age, and the genius of Mendelsohn 
had probably been lost to Germany had not the 
singularity of his studies and the cast of his mind 
been detected by the sagacity of Dr. Kisch. The 
aid of this physician was momentous ; for he de- 
voted several hours every day to the instruction of 
a poor youth, whose strong capacity he b/rid the 
discernment to perceive, and the generous tem- 
per to aid. Mendelsohn was soon enabled to 
read Locke in a Latin version, but with such ex- 
treme pain, that, compelled to search for every 
word, and to arrange their Latin order, and at 
the same time to combine metaphysical ideas, it 




THE FIRST STUDIES. (51 

was observed that he did not so much translate, 
as guess by the force of meditation. 

This prodigious effort of his intellect retarded 
his progress, but invigorated his habit, as the 
racer, by running against the hill, at length courses 
with facility. 

A succeeding effort was to master the living 
languages, and chiefly the English, that he might 
read his favourite Locke in his own idiom. Thus 
a great genius for metaphysics and languages was 
forming itself by itself. 

It is curious to detect, in the character of 
genius, the effects of local and moral influences. 
There resulted from Mendelsohn's early situa- 
tion, certain defects in his intellectual character, 
derived from his poverty, his Jewish education, 
and his numerous impediments in literature. In- 
heriting but one language, too obsolete and naked 
to serve the purposes of modern philosophy, he 
perhaps overvalued his new acquisitions, and in 
his delight of knowing many languages, he with 
difficulty escaped from remaining a mere philolo- 
gist ; while in his philosophy, having adopted the 
prevailing principles of Wolf and Baumgarten, 
his genius was long without the courage or the 

F 



ne 

rst 

he 



02 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

skill to emancipate itself from their rusty chains. 
It was more than a step which had brought him 
into their circle, but a step was yet wanted to es- 
cape from it. 

At length the mind of Mendelsohn enlarg- 
ed in literary intercourse : he became a great 
and original thinker in many beautiful specula- 
tions in moral and critical philosophy ; while 
he had gradually been creating a style which the 
critics of Germany have declared was their firs 
luminous model of precision and elegance 
Thus a Hebrew vagrant, first perplexed in th 
voluminous labyrinth of Judaical learning, in his 
middle age oppressed by indigence and malady, 
and in his mature life wrestling with that com- 
mercial station whence he derived his humbte 
independence, became one of the masterwriter: 
in the literature of his country. The history o 
the mind of Mendelsohn is one of the nobles 
pictures of the self-education of genius. 

Friends, who are so valuable in our youth, 
are usually prejudicial in the youth of genius. 
Peculiar and unfortunate is this state, which is 
put in danger from what in every other it de- 
rives security. The greater part of the multi- 
tude of authors and artists originate in the ig- 
norant admiration of their early friends; while 






THE FIRST STUDIES. 63 



the real genius has often been disconcerted and 
thrown into despair, by the ill judgments of his 
domestic circle. The productions of taste are 
more unfortunate than those which*depend on a 
chain of reasoning, or the detail of facts ; these 
are more palpable to the common judgments of 
men ; but taste is of such rarity, that a long life 
may be passed by some without once obtaining 
a familiar acquaintance with a mind so culti- 
vated by knowledge, so tried by experience, 
and so practised by converse with the literary 
world that its prophetic feeling anticipates the 
f public opinion. When a young writer's first 
essay is shown, some, through mere inability of 
censure, see nothing but beauties ; others, with 
equal imbecility, can see none; and others, 
out of pure malice, see nothing but faults. " I 
was soon disgusted," says Gibbon, " with the 
modest practice of reading the manuscript to my 
friends. Of such friends some will praise for 
politeness, and some will criticise for vanity." 
Had several of our first writers set their fortunes 
on the cast of their friends' opinions, we might 
have lost some precious compositions. The 
friends of Thomson discovered nothing but 
faults in his early productions, one of which 
happened to be bis noblest, the " Winter;" they 
just could discern that these abounded with 



64 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

luxuriances, without being aware that they were 
the luxuriances of a poet. He had created a 
new school in art — and appealed from his circle 
to the public. From a manuscript letter of our 
poet's, written when employed on his " Summer," 
I transcribe his sentiments on his former literary 
friends in Scotland — he is writing to Mallet :* 
" Far from defending these two lines, I damn 
them to the lowest depth of the poetical Tophet, 
prepared of old, for Mitchell, Mori-ice, Rook, 
Cook, Beckingham, and a long &c. Where- 
ever I have evidence, or think I have evidence, 
which is the same thing, I'll be as obstinate as 
all the mules in Persia." This poet, of warm 
affections, so irritably felt the perverse criticisms 
of his learned friends, that they were to share 
alike, nothing less than a damnation to a poetical 
hell. One of these " blasts" broke out in a vin- 
dictive epigram on Mitchell, whom he describes 
with a " blasted eye ;" but this critic having one 
literally, the poet, to avoid a personal reflection, 
could only consent to make the blemish more 
active — 

u Why all not faults, injurious Mitchell ! why 
Appears one beauty to thy blasting eye ?" 

* In Mr. Murray's collection of autographical letters. 



THE FIRST STUDIES. 65 

He again calls him " the planet-blasted Mit- 
chell." Of another of these critical friends he 
speaks with more sedateness, but with a strong 
conviction that the critic, a very sensible man, 
had no sympathy with his poet. " Aikman's 
reflections on my writings are very good, but 
he does not in them regard the turn of my genius 
enough ; should I alter my way I would write 
poorly. I must choose what appears to me the 
most significant epithet, or I cannot, with any 
heart, proceed." The " Mirror," when publish- 
ed in Edinburgh, was " fastidiously" received, as 
all " home-productions" are ; but London aveng- 
ed the cause of the author. When Swift intro- 
duced Parnel to Lord Bolingbroke, and to the 
world, he observes, in his Journal " it is pleasant 
to see one who hardly passed for any thing in 
Ireland, make his way here with a little friendly 
forwarding." There is nothing more trying to the 
judgment of the friends of a young man of geni- 
us, than the invention of a new manner ; without 
. a standard to appeal to, without bladders to swim, 
the ordinary critic sinks into irretrievable distress ; 
but usually pronounces against novelty. When 
Reynolds returned from Italy, warm with all the 
excellence of his art, says Mr. Northcote, and 
painted a portrait, his old master, Hudson, view- 
ing it, and perceiving no trace of his own manner, 
f2 



66 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

exclaimed that he did not paint so well as when 
he left England ; while another, who conceived 
no higher excellence than Kneller, treated 
with signal contempt the future Raphael of 
England. 

If it be dangerous for a young writer to resign 
himself to the opinions of his friends, he also 
incurs some peril in passing them with inattention. 
What an embarrassment ! He wants a Quintilian. 
One great means to obtain such an invaluable 
critic, is the cultivation of his own judgment, in a 
round of meditation and reading ; let him at once 
supply the marble and be himself the sculptor : let 
the great authors of the world be his gospels, and 
the best critics their expounders ; from the one 
he will draw inspiration, and from the others he 
will supply those tardy discoveries in art, which 
he who solely depends on his own experience 
may obtain too late in life. Those who do not 
read criticism will not even merit to be criticised. 
The more extensive an author's knowledge of 
what has been done, the greater will be his pow- 
ers in knowing what to do. Let him preserve 
his juvenile compositions, — whatever these may 
be, they are the spontaneous growth, and, like 
the plants of the Alps, not always found in other 
soils ; they are his virgin fancies ; by contemplat- 



: 



THE FIRST STUDIES. §7 

ing them, he may detect some of his predomi- 
nant habits, — resume an old manner more hap- 
pily, — invent novelty from an old subject he 
had so rudely designed, — and often may steal 
from himself something so fine that, when 
thrown into his most finished compositions, it 
may seem a happiness rather than art. A young 
writer, in the progress of his studies, should 
often recollect a fanciful simile of Dryden. — 

" As those who unripe veins in mines explore, 
On the rich bed again the warm turf lay; 
Till time digests the yet imperfect ore, 
And know it will be Gold another day." 

Ingenious youth ! if, in a constant perusal of 
the master-writers, you see your own sentiments 
anticipated, and in the tumult of your mind as it 
comes in contact with theirs, new ones arise ; 
if in meditating on the Confessions of Rousseau, 
or on those of every man of genius, for they have 
all their confessions, you recollect that you have 
experienced the same sensations from the same 
circumstances, and that you have encountered 
the same difficulties and overcome them by 
the same means, then let not your courage 
be lost in your admiration,-~-but listen to 
that " still small voice" in your heart, which 



68 THE FIRST STUDIES. 

cries with Correggio and with Montesquieu, 
" Ed io anche son Pittore !"* 

* This noble consciousness with which the Italian painter 
gave utterance to his strong feelings on viewing a celebrated 
picture by one of his rivals, is applied by Montesquieu to 
himself at the close of the preface to his great wort . 



(69) 



CHAPTER IV. 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 



The modes of life of a man of genius, often 
tinctured by eccentricity and enthusiasm, are 
in an eternal conflict with the monotonous and 
imitative habits of society, as society is carried 
on in a great metropolis, — where men are neces- 
sarily alike, and in perpetual intercourse, shaping 
themselves to one another. 

The occupations, the amusements, and the 
ardour of the man of genius, are discordant 
with the artificial habits of life ; in the vortexes 
of business or the world of pleasure, crowds of 
human beings are only treading in one another's 
steps ; the pleasures and the sorrows of this active 
multitude are not his, while his are not obvious to 
them : Genius in society is therefore often in a 
state of suffering. Professional characters, who 
are themselves so often literary, yielding to their 



70 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

predominant interests, conform to that assumed 
urbanity which levels them with ordinary minds ; 
but the man of genius cannot leave himself 
behind in the cabinet he quits ; the train of his 
thoughts is not stopt at will, and in the range of 
conversation the habits of his mind will prevail ; 
an excited imagination, a high toned feeling, 
a wandering reverie, a restlessness of temper, are 
perpetually carrying him out of the processional 
line of the mere conversationists. He is, like 
all solitary beings, much too sentient, and pre- 
pares for defence even at a random touch. His 
emotions are rapid, his generalizing views take 
things only in masses, while be treats with levity 
some useful prejudices; he interrogates, he 
doubts, he is caustic ; in a word, he thinks he 
converses, while he is at his studies. Sometimes, 
apparently a complacent listener, we are morti- 
fied by detecting the absent man ; now he ap- 
pears humbled and spiritless, ruminating over 
some failure which probably may be only known 
to himself, and now haughty and hardy for a 
triumph he has obtained, which y*t remains as 
secret to the world. He is sometimes insolent, 
and sometimes querulous. He is stung by jeal- 
ousy ; or he writhes in aversion ; his eyes kindle, 
and his teeth gnash ; a fever shakes his spirit ; 
a fever which has sometimes generated a disease, 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 71 

and has even produced a slight perturbation of 
the faculties.* 



Once we were nearly receiving from the hand 
of genius itself, the most curious sketches of the 
temper, the irascible humours, the delicacy of 
soul even to its shadowiness, from the warm sboz- 
zos of Burns when he began a diary of the heart, 
— a narrative of characters and events, and a 
chronology of his emotions. It was natural for 
such a creature of sensation and passion to pro- 
ject such a regular task ; but quite impossible to 
get through it. The paper-book that he conceiv- 
ed would have recorded all these things, there- 
fore turns out but a very imperfect document. 
Even that little it was not thought proper to give 
entire. Yet there we view a warm original mind, 
when he first stept into the polished circles of so- 
ciety, discovering that he could no longer " pour 
out his bosom, his every thought and floating 
fancy, his very inmost soul, with unreserved 

y I have given a history of Literary Quarrels from personal 
motives, in Quarrels of Authors, vol. iii. p. 285. There we find 
how many controversies, in which the public get involved, 
have sprung from some sudden squabble, some neglect of petty 
civility, some unlucky epithet, or some casual observation 
dropped without much consideration, which mortified or en- 
raged an author. See further symptoms of this disease, at 
the close of the chapter on " Self-praise," in the present work. 



72 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GEJN1NS. 

confidence to another, without hazard of losing 
part of that respect which man deserves from 
man ; or, from the unavoidable imperfections 
attending human nature, of one day repenting 
his confidence." This was the first lesson he 
learnt at Edinburgh, and it was as a substitute 
for such a human being, that he bought a paper- 
book to keep under lock and key ; a security at 
least equal, says he, "to the bosom of any 
friend whatever." Let the man of genius pause 
over the fragments of this " paper-book ;" it 
will instruct as much as any open confession of 
a criminal at the moment he is to suffer. No 
man was more afflicted with that miserable 
pride, the infirmity of men of imagination, 
which exacts from its best friends a perpetual 
reverence and acknowledgment of its powers. 
Our Poet, with all his gratitude and veneration 
for " the noble Glencairn," was " wounded to 
the soul" because his Lordship show r ed " so 
much attention, engrossing attention, to the only 
blockhead at table ; the whole company con 
sisted of his Lordship, Dunderpate, and myself." 
This Dunderpate, who dined with Lord Glen- 
cairn, might have been of more importance to 
the world than even a poet ; one of the best and 
most useful men in it. Burns was equally of- 
fended with another of his patrons, and a literary 




OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 73 

brother, Dr. Blair. At the moment, he too ap- 
peared to be neglecting the irritable Poet — " for 
the mere carcass of greatness — or when his eye 
measured the difference of their point of eleva- 
tion ; I say to myself, with scarcely any emotion," 
(he might have added, except a good deal of 
contempt,) " what do I care for him or his pomp 
either ?" — " Dr. Blair's vanity is proverbially 
known among his acquaintance," adds Burns, at 
the moment that the solitary haughtiness of his 
own genius had entirely escaped his self-observa- 
tion. Such are the chimeras of passion infesting 
the distempered imagination of irritable genius ! 

Such therefore are censured for great irritabil- 
ity of disposition; and that happy equality of 
temper so prevalent among mere men of letters,* 
and which is conveniently acquired by men of 
the world, has been usually refused to great 
mental powers, or to vivacious dispositions ; au- 
thors or artists. The man of wit becomes petu- 
lant, and the profound thinker, morose. 



* The class of Literary Characters whom I would distin- 
guish as men of letters, are described under that title in 
this volume. 



74 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

When Rousseau once retired to a village, he 
had to learn to endure its conversation ; for this 
purpose he was compelled to invent an expedient 
to get rid of his uneasy sensations. " Alone," 
says Rousseau, " I have never known ennui, 
even when perfectly unoccupied ; my imagina- 
tion, filling the void, was sufficient to busy me. 
It is only the inactive chit-chat of the room, 
when every one is seated face to face, and only 
moving their tongues, which I never could sup- 
port. There to be a fixture, nailed with one 
hand on the other, to settle the state of the 
weather, or watch the flies about one, or what 
is worse, to be bandying compliments, this to 
me is not bearable." He hit on the expedient 
of making lace-strings, carrying his working 
cushion in his visits, to keep the peace with th 
country gossips. 






Is the occupation of making a great name 
less anxious and precarious than that of making 
a great fortune ? the progress of a man's capital 
is unequivocal to him, but that of the fame of 
an author, or an artist, is for the greater part of 
their lives of an ambiguous nature. They find 
it in one place, and they lose it in another. W 
may often smile at the local gradations of geni 
us ; the esteem in which an author is held here 



0F THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 75 

and the contempt he encounters there; here 
the learned man is condemned as a heavy drone, 
and there the man of wit annoys the un witty list- 
ener. 

And are not the anxieties, of even the most 
successful, renewed at every work ? often quitted 
in despair, often returned to with rapture; the 
same agitation of the spirits, the same poignant 
delight, the same weariness, the same dissatis- 
faction, the same querulous languishment after 
excellence. Is the man of genius a discoverer? 
the discovery is contested, or it is not compre- 
hended for ten years after, or during his whole 
life ; even men of science are as children before 
him. There is a curious letter in Sir Thomas 
Bodley's Remains to Lord Bacon, then Sir Fran- 
cis, where he remonstrates with Bacon on his 
new mode of philosophising. It seems the fate 
of all originality of thinking to be immediately 
opposed; no contemporary seems equal to its 
comprehension. Bacon was not at all under- 
stood at home in his own day ; his celebrity was 
confined to his History of Henry VII. and to 
his Essays. In some unpublished letters I find 
Sir Edward Coke writing very miserable, but 
very bitter verses, on a # copy of the Instauratio 
presented to him by Bacon, and even James I. 



76 ©F THE IBRITABILTTY OF GENIUS. 

declaring that, like God's power, " it passeth 
beyond all understanding." When Kepler pub- 
lished his work on Comets, the first rational 
one, it was condemned even by the learned 
themselves as extravagant. We see the learned 
Selden signing his recantation ; and long after- 
wards the propriety of his argument on Tithes 
fully allowed; the aged Galileo on his knees, 
with his hand on the Gospels, abjuring, as ab- 
surdities, errors, and heresies, the philosophical 
truthshe had ascertained. Harvey, in his eighti- 
eth year, did not live to witness his great disco- 
very established. Adam Smith was reproached 
by the economists for having borrowed his sys- 
tem from them, as if the mind of genius does 
not borrow little parts to create its own vast 
views. The great Sydenham, by the indepen- 
dence and force of his genius, so highly pro- 
voked the malignant emulation of his rivals, that 
they conspired to have him banished out of the 
College as " guilty of medicinal heresy." Such 
is the fate of men of genius, who advance a cen- 
tury beyond their contemporaries ! 

Is our man of genius a learned author ? Erudi- 
tion is a thirst which its fountains have never 
satiated. What volumes remain to open ! What 
manuscript but makes his heart palpitate ! There 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 77 

is no measure, no term in researches, which every 
new fact may alter, and a date may dissolve. 
Truth! thou fascinating, but severe mistress! 
thy adorers are often broken down in thy servi- 
tude, performing a thousand unregarded task- 
works ;* or now winding thee through thy laby- 

* Look on a striking picture of these thousand task-works, 
coloured by his literary pangs, of Le Grand D'Aussy, the lite- 
rary antiquary, who could never finish his very curious work, 
on " The History of the private life of the French." 

" Endowed with a courage at all proofs, with health, which 
till then was unaltered, and which excess of labour has greatly 
changed, I devoted myself to write the lives of the learned, 
of the sixteenth century. Renouncing all"kinds of pleasure, 
working ten to twelve hours a day, extracting, ceaselessly 
copying ; after this sad life, I now wished to draw breath, 
turn over what I had amassed, and arrange it. I found myself 
possessed of many thousands of bulletins, of which the longest 
did not exceed many lines. At the sight of this frightful 
chaos, from which I was to form a regular history, I must 
confess that I shuddered ; I felt myself for some time in a 
stupor and depression of spirits ; and now actually that I have 
finished this work, I cannot endure the recollection of that 
moment of alarm, without a feeling of involuntary terror. 
What a business is this, good God, of a compiler ! in truth it 
is too much condemned ; it merits some regard. At length I 
regained courage, I returned to my researches : I have com- 
pleted my plan, though every day I was forced to add, to cor- 
rect, to change my facts as well as my ideas: six times has my 
hand recopied my work, and however fatiguing this maybe, 
it certainly is not that portion of my task which has cost me 
most." 

G 2 



78 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

rinth, with a single thread often unravelling, 
and now feeling their way in darkness, doubtful 
if it be thyself they are touching. The man of 
erudition, after his elaborate work, is exposed 
to the fatal omissions of wearied vigilance, or 
the accidental knowledge of some inferior mind, 
and always to the taste, whatever it chance to be, 
of the public. 

The favourite work of Newton was his Chro- 
nology, which he wrote over fifteen times ; but 
desisted from its publication during his life-time, 
from the ill usage he had received, of which he 
gave several instances to Pearce, the Bishop of 
Rochester. The same occurred to Sir John 
Marsham, who found himself accused as not 
being friendly to revelation. When the learned 
Pocock published a specimen of his translation 
of Abulpharagius, an Arabian historian, in 1649, 
it excited great interest, but when he published 
his complete version, in 1663, it met with no 
encouragement ; in the course of those thirteen 
years, the genius of the times had changed; 
oriental studies were no longer in request. 
Thevenot then could not find a bookseller in 
London or at Amsterdam to print his Abulfeda, 
nor another, learned in Arabian lore, his history 
of Saladine. 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 79 

The reputation of a writer of taste is subjected 
to more difficulties than any other. Every day 
we observe, of a work of genius, that those parts 
which have all the racineness of the soil, and as 
such are most liked by its admirers, are the most 
critised. Modest critics shelter themselves under 
that general amnesty too freely granted, that 
tastes are allowed to differ ; but we should ap- 
proximate much nearer to the truth if we say 
that but few of mankind are capable of relishing 
the beautiful, witb that enlarged taste, which com- 
prehends all the forms of feeling which genius 
may assume ; forms which may even at times be 
associated with defects. Would our author de- 
light with the style of taste, of imagination, of 
passion ? a path opens strewed with roses, but his 
feet bleed on their invisible thorns. A man of 
genius composes in a state of intellectual emo- 
tion, and the magic of his style consists of the 
movements of the soul, but the art of conduct- 
ing those movements is separate from the feeling 
which inspires them. The idea in the mind is 
not always to be found under the pen. The 
artist's conception often breathes not in his 
pencil. He toils, and repeatedly toils, to throw 
into our minds that sympathy with which we 
hang over the illusion of his pages, and become 
himself. A great author is a great artist 5 if the 



80 ®F THE IRRITABILITY OP GENIUS. 

hand cannot leave the picture, how much beauty 
will he undo ! yet still he is lingering, still 
strengthening the weak, still subduing the daring, 
still searching for that single idea which awakens 
so many in others, while often, as it once happen- 
ed, the dash of despair hangs the foam on the 
horse's nostrils. The art of composition is of 
such slow attainment, that a man of genius, late 
in life, may discover how its secret conceals itself 
in the habit. When Fox meditated on a history 
which should last with the language, he met his 
evil genius in this new province : the rapidity and 
the fire of his elocution were extinguished by a 
pen unconsecrated by long and previous study ; 
he saw that he could not class with the great his- 
torians of every great people ; he complained, 
while he mourned over the fragment of genius, 
which, after such zealous preparation, he dared 
not complete. Rousseau has glowingly described 
the ceaseless inquietude by which he obtained 
the seductive eloquence of his style, and has said 
that with whatever talent a man may be born, the 
art of writing is not easily obtained. His existing 
manuscripts display more erasures than Pope's, 
and show his eagerness to set down his first 
thoughts, and his art to raise them to the impas- 
sioned style of his imagination. The memoir of 
Gibbon was composed seven or nine times, and 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. gj 

after all, was left unfinished. Burn's anxiety in 
finishing his poems was great ; " all my poetry," 
says he, " is the effect of easy composition, but of 
laborious correction." 

Pope, when employed on the Iliad, found it 
not only occupy his thoughts by day, but haunting 
his dreams by night, and once wished himself 
hanged, to get rid of Homer : and that he expe- 
rienced often such literary agonies, witness his 
description of the depressions and elevations of 
genius, 

" Who pants for glory, finds but short repose, 
A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows !" 

Thus must the days of a great author be passed 
in labours as unremitting and exhausting as those 
of the artizan. The world are not always aware, 
that to some, meditation, composition, and even 
conversation, may inflict pains undetected by the 
eye and the tenderness of friendship. Whenever 
Rousseau passed a morning in company, he tells 
us it was observed that in the evening he was dis- 
satisfied and distressed ; and John Hunter, in 
a mixed company, found conversation fatigued, 
instead of amusing him. Hawks worth, in the 
second paper of the Adventurer, has composed, 
from his own feelings, an eloquent comparatire 



g2 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

estimate of intellectual and corporeal labour ; it 
may console the humble mechanic. 

The anxious uncertainty of an author for his 
compositions resembles that of a lover when he 
has written to a mistress, not yet decided on his 
claims ; he repents his labour, for he thinks he 
has written too much, while he is mortified at 
recollecting that he had omitted some things 
which he imagines would have secured the object 
of his wishes. Madame de Stael, who has often 
entered into feelings familiar to a literary and 
political family, in a parallel between ambition 
with genius, has distinguished them in this, that 
while " ambition perseveres in the desire of ac- 
quiring power, genius flags of itself. Genius in 
the midst of society is a pain, an internal fever 
which would require to be treated as a real 
disease, if the records of glory did not soften the 
sufferings it produces." 

These moments of anxiety often darken the 
brightest hours of genius. Racine had extreme 
sensibility; the pain inflicted by a severe criti- 
cism outweighed all the applause he received. 
He seems to have felt, what he was often re- 
proached with, that his Greeks, his Jews, and 
his Turks were all inmates of Versailles. He 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 33 

had two critics, who, like our Dennis with Pope 
and Addison, regularly dogged his pieces as 
they appeared. Corneille's objections he would 
attribute to jealousy — at his burlesqued pieces 
at the Italian theatre, he would smile outwardly, 
though sick at heart, — but his son informs us, 
that a stroke of raillery from his witty friend 
Chapelle, whose pleasantry scarcely concealed 
its bitterness, sunk more deeply into his heart 
than the burlesques at the Italian theatre, the 
protest of Corneille, and the iteration of the 
two Dennises. The life of Tasso abounds with 
pictures of a complete exhaustion of this kind ; 
his contradictory critics had perplexed him with 
the most intricate literary discussions, and pro- 
bably occasioned a mental alienation. We find 
in one of his letters that he repents the compo- 
sition of his great poem, for although his own 
taste approved of that marvellous, which still 
forms the nobler part of its creation, yet he 
confesses that his critics have decided, that the 
history of his hero Godfrey required another 
species of conduct. " Hence," cries the unhap- 
py bard, " doubts vex me ; but for the past and 
what is done, I know of no remedy ;" and he 
longs to precipitate the publication that "he 
may be delivered from misery and agony." He 
solemnly swears that "did not the circumstances 






84 OF THE IRRITABILITY OP GENIUS. 

of my situation compel me, I would not print 
it, even perhaps during my life, I so much 
doubt of its success." Such was that painful 
state of fear and doubt, experienced by the 
author of the "Jerusalem Delivered" when he 
gave it to the world ; a state of suspense, among 
the children of imagination, of which none 
are more liable to participate in, than the too 
sensitive artist. At Florence may still be viewed 
the many works begun and abandoned by the 
genius of Michael Angelo ; they are preserved 
inviolate ; " so sacred is the terror of Michael 
Angelo's genius !" exclaims Forsyth. Yet these 
works are not always to be considered as failures 
of the chissel; they appear rather to have been 
rejected by coming short of the artist's first 
conceptions. An interesting domestic story has 
been preserved of Gesner, who so zealously 
devoted his graver and his pencil to the arts, but 
his sensibility was ever struggling after that ideal 
excellence he could not attain; often he sunk 
into fits of melancholy, and gentle as he was, 
the tenderness of his wife and friends could not 
sooth his distempered feelings ; it was necessary 
to abandon him to his own thoughts, till after a 
long abstinence from his neglected works, in a 
lucid moment, some accident occasioned him to 
return to them. In one of these hypochondria 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. g£ 

of genius, after a long interval of despair, one 
morning at breakfast with bis wife, his eye fixed 
on one 'of his pictures ; it was a group of fauns 
with young shepherds dancing at the entrance 
of a cavern shaded with vines ; his eye appeared 
at length to glisten ; and a sudden return to 
good humour broke out in this lively apostro- 
phe, ic Ah ! see those playful children, they 
always dance !" This was the moment of gaie- 
ty and inspiration, and he flew to his forsaken 
easel. 

La Harpe, an author by profession, observes, 
that as it has been shown, that there are some 
maladies peculiar to artists, — there are also sor- 
rows which are peculiar to them, and which the 
world can neither pity nor soften, because they 
do not enter into their experience. The queru- 
lous language of so many men of genius has 
been sometimes attributed to causes very differ- 
ent from the real ones, — the most fortunate 
live to see their talents contested and their best 
works decried An author with certain critics 
seems much in the situation of Benedict, when 
he exclaimed — " Hang me in a bottle, like a 
cat, and shoot at me ; and he that hits me, let 
him be clapped on the shoulder, and called 
Adam!" Assuredly many an author has sunk 



gtf OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

into his grave without the consciousness of 
having obtained that fame for which he had in 
vain sacrificed an arduous life. The too feeling 
Smollet has left this testimony to posterity. 
" Had some of those, who are pleased to call 
themselves my friends, been at any pains to 
deserve the character, and told me ingenuously 
what I had to expect in the capacity of an au- 
thor, I should, in all probability, have spared 
myself the incredible labour and chagrin I have 
since undergone." And Smollet was a popular 
writer ! Pope's solemn declaration in the pre- 
face to his collected works comes by no means 
short of Smollet's avowal. Hume's philosophic 
cal indifference could often suppress that irri- 
tability which Pope and Smollet fully indulged. 
But were the feelings of Hume more obtuse, or 
did his temper, gentle as it was constitutionally, 
bear, with a saintly patience, the mortifications 
his literary life so long endured ? After recom- 
posing two of his works, which incurred the 
same neglect in their altered form, he raised the 
most sanguine hopes of his history, — but he 
tells us, " miserable was my disappointment !" 
The reasoning Hume once proposed changing 
his name and his country ! and although he never 
deigned to reply to his opponents, yet they haunt- 
ed him ; and an eye-witness has thus described 
the irritated author discovering in conversation 



OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 87 

his suppressed resentment — " His forcible mode 
of expression, the brilliant quick movements 
of his eyes, and the gestures of his body," — 
these betrayed the pangs of contempt, or of 
aversion ! Erasmus once resolved to abandon for 
ever his favourite literary pursuits ; " if this," 
he exclaimed, alluding to his adversaries, " if 
this be the fruits of all my youthful labours ! — " 

Parties confederate against a man of genius, as 
happened to Corneille, to D'Avenant* and Milton, 
and a Pradon and a Settle carry away the meed 
of a Racine and a Dryden. It was to support 
the drooping spirit of his friend Racine on the 
opposition raised against Phaedra, that Boileau 
addressed to him an epistle on the utility to be 
drawn from the jealousy of the envious. It 
was more to the world than to his country, that 
Lord Bacon appealed, by a frank and noble con- 
ception in his will, — " For my name and memo- 
ry, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and 
to foreign nations, and the next age." The 
calm dignity of the historian De Thou, amidst 
the passions of his times, confidently expected 
that justice from posterity which his own age 
refused to his early and his late labour : that 

* See " Quarrels of Authors," vol. ii. on the confederacy 
©f several wits against D'Avenant, a great genius. 



38 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

great man was, however, compelled, by his 
injured feelings, to compose a poem, under the 
name of another, to serve as his apology against 
the intolerant Court of Rome, and the factious 
politicians of France; it was a noble subterfuge 
to which a great genius was forced. The ac- 
quaintances of the poet Collins probably com- 
plained of his wayward humours and irrita- 
bility ; but how could they sympathize with the 
secret mortification of the poet for having 
failed in his Pastorals, imagining that they 
were composed on wrong principles ; or with a 
secret agony of soul, burning with his own hands 
his unsold, but immortal Odes? Nor must we 
forget here the dignified complaint of the Ram- 
bler, with which he awfully closes his work, in ap 
pealing to posterity. 






In its solitary occupations, genius contracts 
its peculiarities, and in that sensibility which ac- 
companies it, that loftiness of spirit, those quick 
jealousies, those excessive affections and aver- 
sions, which view every thing, as it passes in its 
own ideal world, and rarely as it exists in the me- 
diocrity of reality. This irritability of genius is 
a malady which has raged even among philoso- 
phers : we must not, therefore, be surprised at the 
poetical temperament. They have abandoned 



OF THE IRRIT ABILITY OF GENIUS. 89 

their country, they have changed their name, 
they have punished themselves with exile in the 
rage of their disorder. Descartes sought in vain, 
even in his secreted life, a refuge for his genius ; 
he thought himself persecuted in France, he 
thought himself calumniated among strangers, 
and he went and died in Sweden ; and little did 
that man of genius think, that his countrymen 
would beg to have his ashes restored to them. 
Hume once proposed to change his name and his 
country, and I believe did. The great poetical 
genius of our times has openly alienated him- 
self from the land of his brothers; he becomes 
immortal in the language of a people whom he 
would contemn; he accepts with ingratitude 
the fame he loves more than life, and he is only 
truly great on that spot of earth, whose genius, 
when he is no more, will contemplate on his 
shade in anger and in sorrow. 

Thus, the state of authorship is not friendly 
to equality of temper; and in those various 
humours incidental to it, when authors are often 
affected deeply, while the cause escapes all per- 
ception of sympathy, at those moments the light- 
est injury to the feelings, which at another time 
would make no impression, may produce even 
fury in the warm temper, or the corroding 
h 2 



90 OF THE IRRITABILITY OF GENIUS. 

chagrin of a self-wounded spirit. These are 
moments which claim the tenderness of friend- 
ship, animated by a high esteem for the in- 
tellectual excellence of this man of genius, — 
not the general intercourse of society, — not the 
insensibility of the dull, nor the levity of the 
volatile. 

Men of genius are often reverenced only 
where they are known by their writings; in- 
tellectual beings in the romance of life, — in its 
history, they are men ! Erasmus compared them 
to the 'great figures in tapestry-work, which lose 
their effect when not seen at a distance. Their 
foibles and their infirmities are obvious to their 
associates, often only capable of discerning these 
qualities. The defects of great men are the 
consolation of the dunces. 



(91 ) 




CHAPTER V. 



THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE AND THE 
SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 



When a general intercourse in society prevails, 
the age of great genius has passed ; an equality 
of talents rages among a multitude of authors and 
artists ; they have extended the superficies of 
genius, but have lost the intensity ; the contest 
is more furious, but victory is more rare. The 
founders of National Literature and Art pursued 
their insulated studies in the full independence 
of their mind and the development of their in- 
ventive faculty. The master-spirits who create 
an epoch, the inventors, lived at periods when 
they inherited nothing from their predecessors ; 
in seclusion they stood apart, the solitary lights of 
their age. 

At length, when a people have emerged to 
glory, and a silent revolution has obtained, by 



92 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

a more uniform light of knowledge coming from 
all sides, the genius of society becomes greater 
than the genius of the individual: hence, the 
character of genius itself becomes subordi- 
nate. A conversation age succeeds a studious 
one, and the family of genius are no longer 
recluses. 

The man of genius is now trammelled with 
the artificial and mechanical forms of life ; and 
in too close an intercourse with society, the lone- 
liness and raciness of thinking is modified away 
in its seductive conventions. An excessive 
indulgence in the pleasures of social life con- 
stitutes the great interests of a luxurious and 
opulent age. 

It may be a question, whether the literary 
man and the artist are not immolating their 
genius to society, when, with the mockery of 
Proteus, they lose their own by all orms, in 
the shadowiness of assumed talent. But a 
path of roses, where all the senses are flatter- 
ed, is now opened to win an Epictetus from 
his hut. The morning lounge, the luxurious 
dinner, and the evening party are the regu- 
lated dissipations of hours which true genius 
knows are always too short for Art, and too 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 93 

rare for its inspirations ; and hence so many 
of our contemporaries, whose card-racks are 
crowded, have produced only flashy fragments, 
— efforts, and not works. It is seduction, and 
not reward, which mere fashionable society 
offers the man of true genius, for he must 
be distinguished from those men of the world, 
who have assumed the literary character, for 
purposes very distinct from literary ones. In 
this society, the man of genius shall cease to 
interest, whatever be his talent; he will be 
sought for with enthusiasm, but he cannot 
escape from his certain fate, — that of becom- 
ing tiresome to his pretended admirers. The 
confidential confession of Racine to his son is 
remarkable. " Do not think that I am sought 
after by the great for my dramas ; Corneille 
composes nobler verses than mine, but no one 
notices him, and he only pleases by the mouth of 
the actors. I never allude to my works when 
with men of the world, but I amuse them about 
matters they like to hear. My talent with them 
consists not in making them feel that I have 
any, but in showing them that they have " — 
Racine treated the Great, like the children of 
society; Corneille would not compromise for 
the tribute he exacted ; and consoled himself 



94 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

when, at his entrance into the theatre, the au- 
dience usually rose to salute him. 

Has not the fate of our reigning literary 
favourites been uniform? Their mayoralty 
hardly exceeds the year. They are pushed 
aside to put in their place another, who in his 
turn must descend. Such is the history of the 
literary character encountering the perpetual 
difficulty of appearing what he really is not, 
while he sacrifices to a few, in a certain corner 
of the metropolis, who have long fantastically 
called themselves " The World," that more dig- 
nified celebrity which makes an author's name 
more familiar than his person. To one who 
appeared astonished at the extensive celebrity 
of Buffon, the modern Pliny replied, " I have 
passed fifty years at my desk." And has not 
one, the most sublime of the race, sung— 



■che seggendo in piuma 



In Faraa non si vien, ne sotto coltre \ 
Sanza la qual chi sua vita consuma 
Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia 
Qual fummo in aere, ed in acqua la schiuma. 

Dante, Inferno, c. xxiv 






I 



* " Not by reposing on pillows or under canopies, is Fame 
acquired, without which he, who consumes his life, leaves 
such an unregarded vestige on the earth of his being, as the 
smoke in the air or the foam on the wave." 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 95 

Another, who had great experience of the 
world and of literature,* observes, that literary 
men (and artists) seek an intercourse with the 
great from a refinement of self-love ; they are 
perpetually wanting a confirmation of their own 
talents in the opinions of others, (for their 
rivals are, at all times, very cruelly and very 
adroitly diminishing their reputation ;) for this 
purpose, they require judges sufficiently en- 
lightened to appreciate their talents, but who do 
not exercise too penetrating a judgment. Now 
this is exactly the state of the generality of the 
great, (or persons of fashion,) who cultivate 
taste and literature ; these have only time to ac- 
quire that degree of light which is jus.t sufficient 
to set at ease the fears of these claimants of 
genius. Their eager vanity is more voracious 
than delicate, and is willing to accept an in- 
cense less durable than ambrosia. 

The habitudes -of genius, before it lost its 
freshness in this society, are the mould in which 
the character is cast ; and these, in spite of all 
the disguise of the man, hereafter make him a 
distinct being from the man of society. There 

* D'Alemberer laSociete des Gens de Lettre* et dss Grands, 



gg THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

is something solitary in deep feelings ; and the 
amusers who can only dazzle and surprize, will 
never spread that contagious energy only spring- 
ing from the fullness of the heart. Let the man 
of genius then dread to level himself to that 
mediocrity of feeling and talent required in 
every-day society, lest he become one of them- 
selves. Ridicule is the shadowy scourge o; 
society, and the terror of the man of genius , 
Ridicule surrounds him with her chimeras, like 
the shadowy monsters which opposed JEneas 
too impalpable to be grasped, while the air 
nothings triumph, unwounded by a weapon: — 
JCneas was told to pass the grinning monsters 
unnoticed, and they would then be as harmless, 
as they were unreal. 

Study, Meditation, and Enthusiasm, — this is 
the progress of genius, and these cannot be the 
habits of him who lingers till he can only live 
among polished crowds. If he bears about him 
the consciousness of genius, he will be still act- 
ing under their influences. And perhaps there 
never was one of this class of men who had not 
either first entirely formed himself in solitude, 
or amidst society is perpetually breaking out 
to seek for himself. Wilkes, who, when no 
longer touched by the fervours of literary and 






AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 97 

patriotic glory, grovelled into a domestic volup- 
tuary, observed with some surprize of the great 
Earl of Chatham, that he sacrificed every plea- 
sure of social life, even in youth, to his great 
pursuit of eloquence ; and the Earl himself ac- 
knowledged an artifice he practised in nis inter- 
course with society, for he said, when he was 
young he always came late into company, and 
left it early. Vittorio Alfieri, and a brother- 
spirit in our own noble poet, were rarely seen 
amidst the brilliant circle in which they were 
born ; the workings of their imagination were 
perpetually emancipating them, and one deep 
loneliness of feeling proudly insulated them 
among the unimpassioned triflers of their rank. 
They preserved unbroken the unity of their cha- 
racter, in constantly escaping from the proces- 
sional spectacle of society, by frequent intervals 
of retirement. It is no trivial observation of 
another noble writer, Lord Shaftesbury, that 
" it may happen that a person may be so much 
the worse author, for being the finer gentleman. 5 ' 

An extraordinary instance of this disagree- 
ment between the man of the world and the 
literary character, we find in a philosopher 
seated on a throne. The celebrated Julian 
stained the imperial purple with an author's 



98 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

ink ; and when that Emperor resided among the 
Antiochians, his unalterable character shocked 
that volatile and luxurious race ; he slighted the 
plaudits of their theatre, he abhorred their 
dancers and their horse-racers, he was abstinent 
even at a festival, and perpetually incorrupt, 
admonished this dissipated people of their im- 
pious abandonment of the laws of their country. 
They libelled the Emperor and petulantly lam- 
pooned his beard, which the philosopher care- 
lessly wore, neither perfumed nor curled — 
Julian, scorning to inflict a sharper punishment, 
pointed at them his satire of " the Misopogon, 
or the Antiochian ; the Enemy of the Beard," 
where amidst the irony and invective, the lite- 
rary monarch bestows on himself many exqui- 
site and individual touches. All that those 
persons of fashion alleged against the literary 
character, Julian unreservedly confesses — his un- 
dressed beard and his awkwardnesses, his obsti- 
nacy, his unsociable habits, his deficient tastes, 
&c, while he represents his good qualities as so 
many extravagancies. But, in this pleasantry 
of self-reprehension, he has not failed to show 
this light and corrupt people that he could not 
possibly resemble them. The unhappiness o 
too strict an education under a family tutor, 
who never suffered him to swerve from the one 



; 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 99 

right way, with the unlucky circumstance of 
his master having inspired Julian with such a 
reverence for Plato and Socrates, Aristotle and 
Theophrastus, as to have made they his models: 
:: Whatever manners," says the Emperor, " I 
may have previously contracted, whether gentle 
or boorish, it is impossible for me now to alter or 
unlearn. Habit is said to be a second nature ; 
to oppose it is irksome, but to counteract the 
study of more than thirty years is extremely dili- 
cult, especially when it has been imbibed with so 
much attention." 

And what if men of genius, relinquishing their 
habits, could do this violence to their nature, 
should we not lose the original for a factitious 
genius, and spoil one race without improving 
the other? If nature, and habit, that second 
nature which prevails even over the first, have 
created two beings distinctly different, what 
mode of existence shall ever assimilate them ? 
Antipathies and sympathies, those still occult 
causes, however concealed, will break forth at 
an unguarded moment. The man of genius 
will be restive even in his trammelled paces. Clip 
the wings of an eagle and place him to roost 
among the domestic poultry ; will he peck with 
them ? will he chuck like them ? At some un- 



100 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

foreseen moment his pinions will overshadow and 
terrify his tiny associates, for "the feathered 
king" will be still musing on the rock and the 
cloud. 

Thus is it, as our literary Emperor discovered 
that " we cannot counteract the study of more 
than thirty years, when it has been imbibed with 
so much attention." Men of genius are usually 
not practised in the minuter attentions ; in those 
heartless courtesies, poor substitutes for generous 
feelings ; they have rarely sacrificed to the un- 
laughing graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato in- 
geniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of 
the Athenian apothecaries, which were painted 
on the exterior with the grotesque figures of 
apes and owls, but contained within a precious 
balm. The man of genius may exclaim amidst 
many a circle, as did Themistocles, when asked 
to play on a lute — " I cannot fiddle, but I can 
make a little village a great city;" and with 
Corneille he may be allowed to smile at his own 
deficiencies, and even disdain to please in trivials, 
asserting that, "wanting all these things, he 
was not the less Corneille." With the great 
thinkers and students, their character is still more 
hopeless. Adam Smith could never free him- 
self from the embarrassed manners of a recluse ; 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. JQ1 

he was often absent ; and his grave and formal 
conversation made him seem distant and reserv- 
ed, when, in fact, no man had warmer feelings 
for his intimates. Buffon's conversation was 
very indifferent — and the most eloquent writer 
was then coarse and careless ; after each labori- 
ous day of study, he pleaded that conversation 
was to him only a relaxation. Rousseau gave no 
indication of his energetic style in conversation. 
A princess, desirous of seeing the great moralist 
Nicolle, experienced inconceivable disappoint- 
ment, when the moral instructor, entering with 
the most perplexing bow imaginable, sank down 
silently on his chair; the interview promoted 
no conversation ; and the retired student, whose 
elevated spirit might have endured martyrdom, 
sank with timidity in the unaccustomed honour 
of conversing with a princess, and having nothing 
to say. A lively Frenchman, in a very inge- 
nious description of the distinct sorts of conver- 
sations of his numerous literary friends, among 
whom was Dr. Franklin, energetically hits off 
that close observer and thinker, wary even in 
society ; among these varieties of conversation 
he has noted down " the silence of the celebrat- 
ed Franklin." When Lord Oxford desired to 
be introduced to the studious Thomas Baker, he 
very unaffectedly declined, in a letter I have 
i 2 






]02 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

seen, that honour, " as a rash adventure he could 
not think of engaging in, not having fitted him- 
self for any conversation, but with the dead." 

But this deficient agreeableness in a man of 
genius may be often connected with those quali- 
ties which conduce to the greatness of his public 
character. A vivid perception of truth on the 
sudden, bursts with an irruptive heat on the sub- 
dued tone of conversation ; should he hesitate, 
that he may correct an equivocal expression, or 
grasp at a remote idea, he is in danger of sinking 
into pedantry or rising to genius. Even the te- 
diousness he bestows on us, may well out from 
the fulness of knowledge, or be hammered into a 
hard chain of reasoning ; and how often is the 
cold tardiness of decision, the strict balancings of 
scepticism and candour ! even obscurity may 
arise from the want of previous knowledge in the 
listener. But above all, what offends is that 
freedom of opinion, which a man of genius can 
no more divest himself of than of the features of 
his face ; that intractable obstinacy which may 
be called resistance of character — a rock which 
checks the flowing stream of popular opinions, 
and divides them by the collision. Poor Burns 
could never account to himself why, " though 
when he had a mind he was pretty generally be- 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. j()3 

loved, he could never get the art of commanding 
respect." He imagined it was owing to his 
being deficient in what Sterne calls " that under- 
strapping virtue of discretion." " I am so apt," 
he says, " to a lapsus linguce." 

It is remarkable that the conversationists have 
rarely proved themselves to be the abler writers. 
He whose fancy is susceptible of excitement, in 
the presence of his auditors, making the minds of 
men run with his own, seizing on the first impres- 
sions, and touching, as if he really felt them, the 
shadows and outlines of things — with a memory 
where all lies ready at hand, quickened by habit- 
ual associations, and varying with all those ex- 
temporary changes and fugitive colours, which 
melt away in the rainbow of conversation ; that 
jargon, or vocabulary of fashion, those terms and 
phrases of the week perpetually to be learnt ; 
that wit, which is only wit in one place, and for 
a certain time; such vivacity of animal spirits, 
which often exists separately from the more 
retired intellectual powers ; all these can strike 
out wit by habit, and pour forth a stream of 
phrase that has sometimes been imagined to 
require only to be written down, to be read 
with the same delight it was heard ; we have 
not all the while been sensible of the flutter 



104 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

of their ideas, the violence of their transitions, 
their vague notions, their doubtful assertions, 
and their meagre knowledge — a pen is the ex- 
tinguisher of these luminaries. A curious con- 
trast occurred between Buffon and his friend 
Montbelliard, who was associated in his great 
work ; the one possessed the reverse qualities 
of the other. Montbelliard threw every charm 
of animation over his delightful conversation, 
but when he came to take his seat at the rival 
desk of Buffon, an immense interval separated 
them ; his tongue distilled the music and 
the honey of the bee, but his pen seemed to be 
iron, as cold and as hard, while Buffon's was the 
soft pencil of the philosophical painter of nature. 
The characters of Cowly and Killegrew are an 
instance. Cowly was embarrassed in conversa- 
tion, and had not quickness in argument or re- 
partee ; pensive elegance and refined combi- 
nations could not be struck at to catch fire ; 
while with Killegrew the sparkling bubbles of 
his fancy rose and dropped ; yet when this 
delightful conversationist Wote, the deception 
ceased. Denham, who knew them both, hit 
off the difference between them ; — 

" Had Cowly ne'er spoke ; Killegrew ne'er writ, 
Combin'd in one, they had made a matchless wit." 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. j()5 

Thought and expression are only found easily 
when they lie on the surface ; the operations 
of the intellect with some, are slow and deep. 
Hence it is that slow-minded men are not, as 
men of the world imagine, always the dullest. 
Nicolle said of a scintillant wit, " He conquers 
me in the drawing-room, but he surrenders to me 
at discretion on the staircase." Many a great 
wit has thought the wit which he never spoke, 
and many a great reasoner has perplexed his lis- 
teners. The conversation-powers of some re- 
semble the show-glass of the fashionable trader ; 
all his moderate, capital is there spread out in 
the last novelties ; the magasin within is neither 
rich nor rare. Chaucer was more facetious in 
his Tales, than in his conversation, for the Count- 
ess of Pembroke used to rally him, observing 
that his silence was more agreeable to her than 
his conversation. Tasso's conversation, which 
his friend Manso has attempted to preserve to 
us, was neither gay nor brilliant ; and Goldoni, 
in his drama of Torquato Tasso, has thus con- 
trasted the poet's writings and conversation ; — 

Amrairo il suo talento, gradisco i carmi suoi ; 
Ma piacer non trovo a conversar con lui. 



106 THE SPIRIT OJF LITERATURE 

The sublime Dante was taciturn or satirical ; 
Butler was sullen or biting; Descartes, whose 
habits had formed him for solitude and medita- 
tion, was silent. Addison and Moliere were only 
observers in society ; and Dryden has very ho- 
nestly told us, "my conversation is slow and 
dull; my humour saturnine and reserved; in 
short I am none of those who endeavour to 
break jests in company, or make repartees." It 
was ingeniously said of Vaucanson, that he was 
as much a machine as any he made. Hogarth 
and Swift, who looked on the circles of society 
with eyes of inspiration, were absent in compa- 
ny; but their grossness and asperity did not pre- 
vent the one from being the greatest of comic 
painters, nor the other as much a creator of man- 
ners in his way. Genius even in society is pur- 
suing its own operations ; but it would cease to 
be itself, in becoming another. 

One peculiar trait in the conversations of men 
of genius, which has often injured them when 
the listeners were not intimately acquainted with 
the man, are certain sports of a vacant mind ; 
a sudden impulse to throw out opinions, and 
take views of things in some humour of the mo- 
ment. Extravagant paradoxes and false opi- 
nions are caught up by the humbler prosers; and 
the Philistines are thus enabled to triumph over 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. 1Q7 

the strong and gifted man, because in the hour 
of confidence and in the abandonment of the 
mind, he laid his head in their lap and taught 
them how he might be shorn of his strength. 
Dr. Johnson appears often to have indulged this 
amusement in good and in ill humour. Even 
such a calm philosopher as Adam Smith, as well 
as such a child of imagination as Burns, were 
remarked for this ordinary habit of men of ge- 
nius, which perhaps as often originates in a gen- 
tle feeling of contempt for their auditors, as from 
any other cause. 

Not however that a man of genius does not 
utter many startling things in conversation which 
have been found admirable, when the public 
perused them. How widely the public often 
differ from the individual ! a century's opinion 
may intervene between them. The fate of 
genius resembles that of the Athenian sculptor, 
who submitted his colossal Minerva to a pri- 
vate party ; before the artist they trembled for 
his daring chissel, and behind him they calum- 
niated. The man of genius smiled at the one, 
and forgave the other. The statue once fixed 
in a public place, and seen by the whole city, 
was the divinity. There is a certain distance 
at which opinions, as well as statues, must be 
viewed. 



103 THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE 

But enough of those defects of men of genius, 
which often attend their conversations. Must 
we then bow to authorial dignity, and kiss hands, 
because they are inked ; and to the artist, who 
thinks us as nothing unless we are canvass under 
his hands? are there not men of genius, the grace 
of society ? fortunate men ! more blest than their 
brothers ; but for this, they are not the more men 
of genius, nor the others less. To how many 
of the ordinary intimates of a superior genius, 
who complain of his defects, might one say, 
" Do his productions not delight and sometimes 
surprise you ? — You are silent — I beg your par- 
don ; the public has informed you of a great 
name ; you would not otherwise have perceived 
the precious talent of your neighbour. You 
know little of your friend but his name." The 
personal familiarity of ordinary minds with a 
man of genius has often produced a ludicrous 
prejudice. A Scotchman, to whom the name of 
a Dr. Robertson had travelled down, was curious 
to know who he was ? " Your neighbour !" but 
he could not persuade himself that the man 
whom he conversed with was the great histo- 
rian of his country. Even a good man could 
not believe in the announcement of the Messiah, 
from the same sort of prejudice, " Can there 



AND THE SPIRIT OF SOCIETY. JQ9 

any thing good come out of Nazareth?" said 
Nathaniel. 



Suffer a man of genius to be such as nature 
and habit have formed him, and he will then be 
the most interesting companion ; then will you 
see nothing but his mighty mind when it opens 
itself on you. Barry was the most repulsive of 
men in his exterior, in the roughness of his lan- 
guage and the wildness of his looks ; interming- 
ling vulgar oaths, which, by some unlucky associa- 
tion of habit, he seemed to use as strong expletives 
and notes of admiration. His conversation has 
communicated even a horror to some : on one of 
these occasions, a pious lady, who had felt such 
intolerable uneasiness in his presence, did not 
however leave this man of genius that evening, 
without an impression that she had never heard 
so divine a man in her life. The conversation 
happening to turn on that principle of Benevo- 
lence which pervades Christianity and the meek- 
ness of the Founder, it gave Barry an opportu- 
nity of opening on the character of Jesus, with 
that copiousness of heart and mind, which once 
heard could never be forgotten. That artist 
had indeed long in his meditations, an ideal 
head of Christ, which he was always talking to 
execute ; " It is here !" he would cry, striking 



HO THE SPIRIT OF LITERATURE, &c. 

his head. What baffled the invention, as we are 
told, of Leonardo da Vinci, who left his Christ 
headless, having exhausted his creative faculty 
among the apostles, Barry was still dreaming on ; 
but this mysterious mixture of a human and ce- 
lestial nature could only be conceived by his 
mind, and even the catholic enthusiasm of Bar- 
ry was compelled to refrain from unveiling it 
to the eye, — but this unpainted picture was 
perpetually exciting this artist's emotions in con- 
versation. 

Few authors and artists but are eloquently 
instructive on that sort of knowledge or that 
department of art which has absorbed all their 
affections ; their conversations affect the mind to 
a distant period of life. Who has forgotten what 
a man of genius has said at such moments ? the 
man of genius becomes an exquisite instrument, 
when the hand of the performer knows to call 
forth the rich confluence of the sounds ; and — 



" The flying fingers touch into a voice." 

D'Avenant 






( 111 } 



CHAPTER VI. 



LITERARY SOLITUDE. 



1 he literary character is reproached with an 
extreme passion for retirement, cultivating those 
insulating habits which are great interruptions, 
and even weakeners of domestic happiness, 
while in public life these often induce to a 
succession from its cares, thus eluding its active 
duties. Yet the vacancies of retired men are 
eagerly filled by so many unemployed men of 
the world more happily framed for its business. 
We do not hear these accusations raised against 
the painter who wears away his days at his 
easel, and the musician by the side of his instru- 
ment ; and much less should we against the legal 
and the commercial character ; yet all these are 
as much withdrawn from public and private life 
as the literary character ; their desk is as insu- 
lating as the library. Yet is the man who is 
working for his individual interest more highly 
estimated than the retired student, whose disin- 



X12 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 

terested pursuits are at least more profitable to 
the world than to himself. La Bruyere discover- 
ed the world's erroneous estimate of literary 
labour: "There requires a better name to be 
bestowed on the leisure (the idleness he calls itj 
of the literary character, and that to meditate, to 
compose, to read and to be tranquil, should be 
called working." But so invisible is the progress 
of intellectual pursuits, and so rarely are the ob- 
jects palpable to the observers, that the literary 
character appears denied for his pursuits, what 
cannot be refused to every other. That unre- 
mitting application, that unbroken series of their 
thoughts, admired in every profession, is only com- 
plained of in that one whose professors with so 
much sincerity mourn over the shortness of life, 
which has often closed on them while sketching 
their works. 

It is, however, only in solitude that the genius 
of eminent men has been formed ; there their first 
thoughts sprang, and there it will become them 
to find their last : for the solitude of old age — 
and old age must be often in solitude — will be 
found the happiest with the literary character. 
Solitude is the nurse of enthusiasm, and enthu- 
siasm is the true parent of genius ; in all ages it 
has been called for — it has been flown to. N< 



LITERARY SOLITUDE. 113 

considerable work was ever composed, but its 
author, like an ancient magician, first retired to 
the grove, or to the closet, to invocate. When 
genius languishes in an irksome solitude among 
crowds, that is the moment to fly into seclusion 
and meditation. There is a society in the deepest 
solitude > in all the men of genius of the past — 

" First of your kind, Society divine !" 

Thomson. 

and in themselves ; for there only they can in- 
dulge in the romances of their soul, and only in 
solitude can they occupy themselves in their 
dreams and their vigils, and, with the morning, 
fly without interruption to the labour they had 
reluctantly quitted. This desert of solitude, so 
vast and so dreary to the man of the world, to the 
man of genius opens the magical garden of Ar- 
mida, whose enchantments arose amidst solitude, 
while solitude was every where among those en- 
chantments. 

Whenever Michael Angelo was meditating on 

some great design, he closed himself up from the 

world. " Why do you lead so solitary a life ?" 

asked a friend. " Art," replied the sublime ar- 

k 2 



114 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 

tist, " Art is a jealous god ; it requires the whole 
and entire man." 

We observe men of genius, in public situations, 
sighing for this solitude ; amidst the impediments 
of the world, and their situation in it, they are 
doomed to view their intellectual banquet often 
rising before them, like some fairy delusion, 
never to taste it. They feel that finer existence 
in solitude. Lord Clarendon, whose life so hap- 
pily combined the contemplative with the active 
powers of man, dwells on three periods of retire- 
ment which he enjoyed ; he always took pleasure 
in relating the great tranquillity of spirit experi- 
enced during his solitude at Jersey, where for 
more than two years, employed on his History, 
he daily wrote " one sheet of large paper with his 
own hand." At the close of his life, his literary 
labours in his other retirements are detailed with 
a proud satisfaction. Each of his solitudes occa- 
sioned a new acquisition ; this the Spanish, that 
the French, and a third the Italian literature. 
The public are not yet acquainted with the ferti- 
lity of Lord Clarendon's literary labours. It was 
not vanity that induced Scipio to declare of soli- 
tude, that it had no loneliness to him, since he 
voluntarily retired amidst a glorious life to his 
Linternum. Cicero was uneasy amidst applaud- 



LITERARY SOLITUDE, 1 15 

ing Rome, and has distinguished his numerous 
works by the titles of his various villas. Aulus 
Gellius marked his solitude by his " Attic Nights." 
The " Golden Grove" of Jeremy Taylor is the 
produce of his retreat at the Earl of Carber- 
ry's seat in Wales ; and the " Diversions of Pur- 
ley" preserved a man of genius for posterity. 
Voltaire had talents, and perhaps a taste for socie- 
ty ; but at one period of his life he passed five 
years in the most secret seclusion. Montesquieu 
quitted the brilliant circles of Paris for his books, 
his meditations, and his immortal work, and was 
ridiculed by the gay triflers he deserted. Har- 
rington, to compose his Oceana, severed himself 
from the society of his friends. Descartes, in- 
flamed by genius, hires an obscure house in an 
unfrequented quarter at Paris, and there he passes 
two years, unknown to his acquaintance. Adam 
Smith, after the publication of his first work, 
throws himself into a retirement that lasts ten 
years : even Hume rallies him for separating him- 
self from the world ; but by this means the great 
political inquirer satisfied the world by his great 
work. And thus it was with men of genius, long 
ere Petrarch withdrew to his Val chiusa. 

The interruption of visitors by profession has 
been feelingly lamented by men of letters. — 



116 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 

The mind, maturing its speculations, feels the 
unexpected conversation of cold ceremony, 
chilling as the blasts of March winds over the 
blossoms of the Spring. Those unhappy beings 
who wander from house to house, privileged by 
the charter of society to obstruct the knowledge 
they cannot impart, to tire because they are 
tired, or to seek amusement at the cost of 
others, belong to that class of society which 
have affixed no other value to time than that of 
getting rid of it ; these are judges not the best 
qualified to comprehend the nature and evil of 
their depredations in the silent apartment of the 
studious. " We are afraid," said some of those 
visitors to Baxter, " that we break in upon your 
time." — To be sure you do," replied the dis- 
turbed and blunt scholar. Ursinus, to hint as 
gently as he could to his friends that he was 
avaricious of time, contrived to place an inscrip- 
tion over the door of his study, which could not 
fail to fix their eye, intimating that whoever re- 
mained there must join in his labours. The 
amiable Melancthon, incapable of a harsh ex- 
pression, when he received these idle visits, only 
noted down the time he had expended, that he 
might reanimate his industry, and not lose a day. 
The literary character has been driven to the 
most inventive shifts to escape the irruption of a 



LITERARY SOLITUDE. H7 

formidable party at a single rush, who enter with- 
out " besieging or beseeching," as Milton has it. 
The late elegant, poetical Mr. Ellis, on one of 
these occasions, at his country-house, showed a 
literary friend, that when driven to the last, he 
usually made his escape by a leap out of the win- 
dow. Brand Hollis endeavoured to hold out 
" the idea of singularity as a shield ;" and the 
great Robert Boyle was compelled to advertise 
in a newspaper that he must decline visits on cer- 
tain days, that he might have leisure to finish some 
of his works.* 

But this solitude, at first a necessity, and 
then a pleasure, at length is not borne without 
repining. To tame the fervid wildness of youth 
to the strict regularities of study is a sacrifice 
performed by the votary ; but even Milton ap- 
pears to have felt this irksome period of life ; 
for in the preface to Smectymnuus he says, 
" It is but justice not to defraud of due esteem 
the wearisome labours and studious watchings 
wherein I have spent and tired out almost a 
whole youth." Cowley, that enthusiast for se- 
clusion, in his retirement calls himself " the mel- 

* This curious advertisement is preserved in Dr. Birch's 
Life of Boyle, p. 272. 



118 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 

ancholy Cowley." I have seen an original letter 
of this poet to Evelyn, where he expresses his 
eagerness to see Evelyn's Essay on Solitude ; for 
a copy of which he had sent over the town, with- 
out obtaining one, being " either all bought up, 
or burnt in the fire of London." I am the more 
desirous, he says, because it is a subject in which 
I am most deeply interested. Thus Cowley was 
requiring a book to confirm his predilection, and 
we know he made the experiment, which did not 
prove a happy one. We find even Gibbon, with 
all his fame about him, anticipating the dread he 
entertained of solitude in advanced life. " I fee], 
and shall continue to feel, that domestic solitude, 
however it may be alleviated by the world, by 
study, and even by friendship, is a comfortless 
state, which will grow more painful as I descend 
in the vale of years." And again — " Your 
visit has only served to remind me that man, 
however amused or occupied in his closet, was 
not made to live alone." ^ 

Had the mistaken notions of Sprat not de- 
prived us of Cowley's correspondence, we doubt- 
less had viewed the sorrows of lonely genius 
touched by a tender pencil. But we have 
Shenstone, and Gray, and Swift. The heart of 
Shenstone bleeds in the dead oblivion of solitude. 






LITERARY SOLITUDE. H9 

" Now I am come from a visit, every little 
uneasiness is sufficient to introduce my whole 
train of melancholy considerations, and to make 
me utterly dissatisfied with the life I now lead, 
and the life I foresee I shall lead. I am angry 
and envious, and dejected, and frantic, and dis- 
regard all present things, as becomes a madman 
to do. I am infinitely pleased, though it is a 
gloomy joy, with the application of Dr. Swift's 
complaint, that he is forced to die in a rage, 
like a rat in a poisoned hole." Let the lover of 
solitude muse on its picture throughout the 
year, in this stanza by the same amiable, but 
suffering poet — 

Tedious again to curse the drizzling day, 
Again to trace the wintry tracks of snow, 

Or, soothed by vernal airs, again survey 
The self-same hawthorns bud, and cowslips blow. 

Swift's letters paint with terrifying colours a 
picture of solitude; and at length his despair 
closed with idiotism. Even the playful muse 
of Gresset throws a sombre querulousness over 
the solitude of men of genius — 

Je les vois, Victimes du Genie, 

Au foible prix d'un eclat passager, 

Vivre isoles sans jouir de la vie ! 

Vingt ans d'Ennuispour quelques jours de Gloire. 



120 LITERARY SOLITUDE. 

Such are the necessity, the pleasures, and the 
inconveniences of solitude ! Were it a question, 
whether men of genius should blend with the 
masses of society, one might answer, in a style 
rather oracular, but intelligible to the initiated — 
Men of genius ! live in solitude, and do not live 
in solitude ! 



1 121 ) 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 



A continuity of attention, a patient quiet- 
ness of mind, forms one of the characteristics of 
genius. 

A work on the Art of Meditation has not yet 
been produced ; it might prove of immense ad- 
vantage to him who never happened to have 
more than one solitary idea. The pursuit of a 
single principle has produced a great work, and 
a loose hint has conducted to a new discovery. 
But while in every manual art, every great 
workman improves on his predecessor, of the 
art of the mind, notwithstanding the facility of 
practice and our incessant experience, millions 
are yet ignorant of the first rudiments ; and men 
of genius themselves are rarely acquainted witk 
the materials they are working on. Johnson 
has a curious observation on the mind itself,— 
he thinks it obtains a stationary point, from 



122 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

whence it can never advance, occurring before 
the middle of life. He says, " when the powers 
of nature have attained their intended energy, 
they can be no more advanced. The shrub can 
never become a tree. Nothing then remains but 
practice and experience ; and perhaps why they do 
so little, may be worth inquiry."* The result of 
this inquiry would probably lay a broader founda- 
tion for this art of the mind than we hare hitherto 
possessed. Ferguson has expressed himself with 
sublimity — " The lustre which man casts around 
him, like the flame of a meteor, shines only while 
Ins motion continues ; the moments of rest and 
of obscurity are the same." What is this art of 
meditation, but the power of withdrawing our- 
selves from the world, to view that world moving 
within ourselves, while we are in repose ; as the 
artist by an optical instrument concentrates the 
boundless landscape around him, and patiently 
traces all nature in that small space. 

Certain constituent principles of the mind it- 
self, which the study of metaphysics has curiously 
discovered, offer many important regulations in 
this desirable art. We may even suspect, since 

* I recommend the reader to turn to the whole passage, in 
Johnson's Letters to Mrs. Thrale, vol. i. p. 296. 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 123 

men of genius in the present age have confided to 
us the secrets of their studies, that this art may 
be carried on by more obvious means, and even 
by mechanical contrivances, and practical habits- 
There is a government of our thoughts; and many 
secrets yet remain to be revealed in the art of the 
mind ; but as yet they consist of insulated facts, 
from which, however, may hereafter be formed 
an experimental history. Many little habits may 
be contracted by genius, and may be observed in 
ourselves. A mind well organized may be regu- 
lated by a single contrivance : it is by a bit of 
lead that we are enabled to track the flight of 
time. The mind of genius can be made to take 
a particular disposition, or train of ideas. It is a 
remarkable circumstance in the studies of men of 
genius, that previous to composition they have 
often awakened their imagination by the imagina- 
tion of their favourite masters. By touching a 
magnet they became a magnet. A circumstance 
has been recorded of Gray, by Mr. Mathias, " as 
worthy of all acceptation among the higher vota- 
ries of the divine art, when they are assured that 
Mr. Gray never sate down to compose any poetry 
without previously, and for a considerable time, 
reading the works of Spenser." But the circum- 
stance was not unusual with Malherbe, Corneille, 
and Racine ; and the most fervid verses of Homer, 



J 24 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

and the most tender of Euripides, were often re- 
peated by Milton. Even antiquity exhibits the 
same exciting intercourse of the mind of genius. 
Cicero informs us how his eloquence caught 
inspiration from a constant study of the Latin 
and Grecian poetry ; and it has been recorded of 
Pompey, who was great even in his youth, that 
he never undertook any considerable enterprise, 
without animating his genius by having read to 
him the character of Agamemnon in the first 
Iliad ; although he acknowledged that the enthu- 
siasm he caught came rather from the poet than 
the hero. When Bossuet had to compose a 
funeral oration, he was accustomed to retire 
for several days to his study, to ruminate over 
the pages of Homer; and when asked the reason 
of this habit, he exclaimed, in these lines, 

Magnam mihi mentem, animunque 

Delius inspiret Vates 

It is on the same principle of pre-disposing 
the mind, that many have first generated their 
feelings in the symphonies of music. Alfieri, 
often before he wrote, prepared his mind by 
listening to music — a circumstance which has 
been recorded of others. 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 125 

We are scarcely aware how we may govern 
our thoughts by means of our sensations. De 
Luc was subject to violent bursts of passion, 
but he calmed the interior tumult by the artifice 
of filling his mouth with sweets and comfits. 
When Goldoni found his sleep disturbed by the 
obtrusive ideas still floating from the studies of 
the day, he contrived to lull himself to rest by 
conning in his mind a vocabulary of the Vene- 
tian dialect, translating some word into Tuscan 
and French ; which being a very uninteresting 
occupation, at the third or fourth version this 
recipe never failed. This was an art of with- 
drawing attention from the greater to the less 
emotion ; where, as the interest weakened, the 
excitement ceased. Mendelsohn, whose feeble 
and too sensitive frame was often reduced to the 
last stage of suffering by intellectual exertion, 
when engaged in any point of difficulty, would 
in an instant contrive a perfect cessation from 
thinking, by mechanically going to the window, 
and counting the tiles upon the roof of his neigh- 
bour's house. Facts like these show how much 
art may be concerned in the management of the 
mind. 

Some profound thinkers could not pursue the 
operations of their mind in the distraction of 
l 2 



126 *HE MEDITATIOiNS OF GENIUS. 

light and noise. Mallebranche, Hobbes, Tho- 
mas, and others closed their curtains to concen- 
trate their thoughts, as Milton says of the mind, 
"in the spacious circuits of her musing." The 
study of on author or an artist would be ill 
placed in the midst of a beautiful landscape ; 
the Penseroso of Milton, " hid from day's garish 
eye," is the man of genius. A secluded and 
naked apartment, with nothing but a desk, a 
chair, and a single sheet of paper, was for 
fifty years the study of Buffon ; the single orna- 
ment was a print of Newton placed before his 
eyes — nothing broke into the unity of his rev- 
eries. 



a 



The arts of memory have at all times excite 
the attention of the studious ; they open a 
world of undivulged mysteries ; every one 
seems to form some discovery of his own, 
but which rather excites his astonishment than 
enlarges his comprehension. When the late 
William Hutton, a man of an origninal cast of 
mind, as an experiment in memory, opened a 
book which he had divided into 365 columns, ac- 
cording to the days of the year, he resolved to try 
to recollect an anecdote, as insignificant and re- 
mote as he was able, rejecting all under ten years 



THE MEDITATIONS OP GENIUS. |2f 

of age ; and to his surprise, he filled those spa- 
ces for small reminiscencies, within ten columns ; 
but till this experiment had been made, he never 
conceived the extent of this faculty. When 
we reflect, that whatever we know, and what- 
ever we feel, are the very smallest portions of 
all the knowledge and all the feelings we have 
been acquiring through life, how desirable 
would be that art, which should open again the 
scenes which have vanished, revive the emotions 
which other impressions have effaced, and enrich 
our thoughts, with thoughts not less precious ; 
the man of genius who shall possess this art, will 
not satisfy himself with the knowledge of a few 
mornings and its transient emotions, writing on 
the moveable sand of present sensations, present 
feelings, which alter with the first breezes of 
public opinion. Memory is the foundation of 
genius ; for this faculty, with men of genius, is 
associated with imagination and passion, it is a 
chronology not merely of events, but of emo- 
tions ; hence they remember nothing that is not 
interesting to their feelings, while the ordinary 
inind, accurate on all events alike, is not impas- 
sioned on any. The incidents of the novelist, 
are often founded on the common ones of life ; 
and the personages so admirably alive in his 



128 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

fictions, he only discovered among the crowd. 
The arts of memory will preserve all we wish ; 
they form a saving bank of genius, to which it 
may have recourse, as a wealth which it can 
accumulate unperceivably amidst the ordinary 
expenditure. Locke taught us the first rudi- 
ments of this art, when he showed us how he 
stored his thoughts and his facts, by an artificial 
arrangement ; and Addison, before he commen- 
ced his Spectators, had amassed three folios of 
materials ; but the higher step will be the vol- 
ume which shall give an account of a man to 
himself, where a single observation, a chronicled 
emotion, a hope or a project, on which the soul 
may still hang, like a clew of past knowledge 
in his hand, will restore to him all his lost stu- 
dies; his evanescent existence again enters into 
his life, and he will contemplate on himself as 
an entire man : to preserve the past, is half of 
immortality. 

The memorials of Gibbon and Priestly pre- 
sent us with the experience and the habits of 
the literary Character. " What I have known," 
says Dr. Priestly, " with respect to myself, 
has tended much to lessen both my admiration 
and my contempt of others. Could we have 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 139 

entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and 
have traced all the steps by which he produced 
his great works, we might see nothing very 
extraordinary in the process." Our student, 
with an ingenuous simplicity, opens to us that 
" variety of mechanical expedients by which he 
secured and arranged his thoughts," and that 
discipline of the mind, by a peculiar arrange- 
ment of his studies, for the day and for the year, 
in which he rivalled the calm and unalterable 
system pursued by Gibbon. Buffon and Voltaire 
employed the same manoeuvres, and often only 
combined the knowledge they obtained, by hum- 
ble methods. They knew what to ask for, and 
made use of an intelligent secretary; aware, 
as Lord Bacon has expressed it, that some Books 
" may be read by deputy." Buffon laid down 
an excellent rule to obtain originality, when he 
advised the writer, first to exhaust his own 
thoughts before he attempted to consult other 
writers. The advice of Lord Bacon, that we 
should pursue our studies, whether the mind is 
disposed or indisposed, is excellent ; in the one 
case, we shall gain a great step, and in the other, 
we " shall work out the knots and stands of the 
mind, and make the middle times the more plea- 
sant." John Hunter very happily illustrated the 
advantages, which every one derives from putting 



1 30 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

his thoughts in writing ; " it resembles," said he 
" a tradesman taking stock ; without which, he 
never knows either what he possesses, or in what 
he is deficient." Industry is the feature by which 
the ancients so frequently describe an eminent 
character; such phrases as " incredibili industrial 
diligentia singulari" are usual. When we reflect 
on the magnitude of the labours of Cicero, 
Erasmus, Gesner, Baronius, Lord Bacon, Usher, 
and Bayle, we seem asleep at the base of these 
monuments of study, and scarcely awaken to 
admire. Such are the laborious instructors o: 
mankind ! 






Nor let those other artists of the mind, who 
work in the airy looms of fancy and wit, ima- 
gine that they are weaving their webs, without 
the direction of a principle, and without a 
secret habit which they have acquired ; there 
may be even an art, unperceived by themselves, 
in opening and pursuing a scene of pure inven- 
tion, and even in the happiest turns of wit. 
One who had all the experience of such an artist, 
has employed the very terms we have used, of 
" mechanical" and <{ habitual." " Be assured," 
says Goldsmith, " that wit is in some measure 
mechanical ; and that a man long habituated to 
Catch at even its resemblance, will at last be 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 131 

happy enough to possess the substance. By a 
long habit of writing, he acquires a justness of 
thinking, and a mastery of manner, which holiday 
writers, even with ten times his genius, may vain- 
ly attempt to equal." Even in the sublime 
efforts of imagination, this art of meditation may 
be practised ; and Alfieri has shown us, that in 
those energetic tragic dramas which were often 
produced in a state of enthusiasm, he pursued 
a regulated process. " All my tragedies have 
been composed three times," and he describes 
the three stages of conception, development, 
and versifying. " After these three operations, 
I proceed like other authors, to polish, correct 
or amend." 

li All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself!" 
exclaimed Metastasio ; and we may add, even 
the meditations of genius. Some of its boldest 
conceptions are indeed fortuitous, starting up 
and vanishing almost in the perception ; like 
that giant form, sometimes seen amidst the gla- 
cieres, opposite the traveller, afar from him 
moving as he moves, stopping as he stops, yet, 
in a moment lost, and perhaps never more seen, 
— although but his own reflection ! Often in the 
still obscurity of the night, the ideas, the studies, 
the whole history of the day is acted over again, 



132 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

and in these vivid reveries, we are converted into 
spectators. A great poetical contemporary of our 
country does not think that even his dreams should 
pass away unnoticed, and keeps, what he calls, a 
register of nocturnals. The historian De Thou 
was one of those great literary characters, who, 
all his life, was preparing to write the history 
which he wrote ; omitting nothing, in his travels 
and his embassies, which went to the formation of 
a great man, De Thou has given a very curious 
account of his dreams. Such was his passion for 
study, and his ardent admiration of the great 
men whom he conversed with, that he often 
imagined in his sleep, that he was travelling in 
Italy, in Germany, and in England, where he 
saw and consulted the learned, and examined 
their curious libraries j he had all his life time 
these literary dreams, but more particularly 
lvhen in his travels, he thus repeated the images 
of the day. If memory does not chain down 
these hurrying, fading children of the imagina- 
tion, and 

" Snatch the faithless fugitives to light" 

Pleasures of Memory. 

with the beams of the morning, the mind sud- 
denly finds itself forsaken and solitary. Rous* 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 133 

<eau has uttered a complaint on this occasion : 
full of enthusiasm, he devoted to the subject of 
his thoughts, as was his custom, the long sleep- 
less intervals of his nights, meditating in bed, 
with his eyes closed, he turned over his periods, 
in a tumult of ideas ; but when he rose and 
had dressed, all was vanished, and when he sat 
down to his papers, he had nothing to write. 
Thus genius has its vespers, and its vigils, as 
well as its matins, which we have been so often 
told are the true hours of its inspiration — but 
every hour may be full of inspiration for him who 
knows to meditate. No man was more practised 
in this art of the mind, than Pope, and even the 
night was not an unregarded portion of his poet- 
ical existence. 

Few works of magnitude presented themselves 
at once, in their extent and their associations to 
their authors ; the man of genius perceives not 
more than two or three striking circumstances, 
unobserved by another; in revolving the subject, 
the whole mind is gradually agitated ; it is a 
summer landscape, at the break of day> wrapt in 
mist, where the sun strikes on a single object* 
till the light and warmth increasing, all starts 
up in the noon-day of imagination. How beauti- 
fully this state of the mind, in the progress oi 



134 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENlUfe. 

composition, is described by Dryden, alluding 
to his work, " when it was only a confused mass 
of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark ; 
when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving 
the sleeping images of things, towards the light, 
there to be distinguished, and then either to be 
chosen or rejected, by the judgment." At that 
moment, he adds, " I was in that eagerness of 
imagination, which, by over-pleasing fanciful men, 
flatters them into the danger of writing." Gib- 
bon tells us of his history, " at the onset, all was 
dark and doubtful ; even the title of the work, 
the true era of the decline and fall of the em- 
pire, Sic. I was often tempted to cast away the 
labour of seven years." Winckelman was long 
lost in composing his "History of Art;" a hun- 
dred fruitless attempts were made, before he could 
discover a plan amidst the labyrinth. Slight con- 
ceptions kindle finished works : a lady asking for 
a few verses on rural topics, of the Abbe De 
Lille, his specimens pleased, and sketches heaped 
on sketches, produced " Les Jardins. In writing 
the " Pleasures of Memory," the poet at first 
proposed a simple description in a few nes, till 
conducted by meditation, the perfect composition 
of several years closed in that fine poem. And 
thus it happened with the Rape of the Lock, 
and many celebrated productions. 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. , 135 

Were it possible to collect some thoughts of 
great thinkers, which were never written, we 
should discover vivid conceptions, and an origi- 
nality they never dared to pursue in their works ! 
Artists have this advantage over authors, that 
their virgin fancies, their chance felicities, which 
labour cannot afterwards produce, are constantly 
perpetuated; and these " studies" as they are 
called, are as precious to posterity, as their more 
complete designs. We possess one remarkable 
evidence of these fortuitous thoughts of genius 
Pope and Swift, being in the country together, 
observed, that if contemplative men were to 
notice " the thoughts which suddenly present 
themselves to their minds, when walking in the 
fields, &c. they might find many as well worth 
preserving, as some of their more deliberate 
reflexions." They made a trial, and agreed to 
write down such involuntary thoughts as occurred 
during their stay there ; these furnished out the 
" Thoughts" in Pope's and Swift's miscellanies.* 
Among Lord Bacon's Remains, we find a paper 
entitled " sudden thoughts, set down for profit." 
At all hours, by the side of Voltaire's bed, or on 

* This anecdote is found in Ruffhead's life of Pope, evi- 
dently given by Warburton, as was every thing of personal 
knowledge in that tasteless volume of a mere lawyer, writing 
the life of a poet. 



136 4 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

his table, stood his pen and ink, with slips of 
paper. The margins of his books were covered 
with his " sudden thoughts.' ' Cicero, in reading, 
constantly took notes and made comments ; but 
we must recollect there is an art of reading, as 
well as an aft of thinking. 

This art of meditation may be exercised at all 
hours and in all places ; and men of genius in their 
walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning 
the eye of the mind inwards, can form an arti- 
ficial solitude ; retired amidst a crowd, and wise 
amidst distraction and folly. Some of the great 
actions of men of this habit of mind, were first 
meditated on, amidst the noise of a convivial 
party, or the music of a concert. The victory 
of Waterloo might have been organized in the 
ball room at Brussels, as Rodney at the table of 
Lord Sandwich, while the bottle was briskly 
circulating, was observed arranging bits of cork ; 
his solitary amusement having excited an in- 
quiry, he said that he was practising a plan how 
to annihilate an enemy's fleet; this afterwards 
proved to be that discovery of breaking the line, 
which the happy audacity of the hero executed. 
Thus Hogarth, with an eye always awake to 
the ridiculous, would catch a character on his 
thumb-nail; Leonardo da Vinci could detect in 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 137 

the stains of an old weather-beaten wall, the 
landscapes of nature, and Haydn carefully noted 
down in a pocket book, the passages and ideas 
which came to him in his walks, or amidst com- 
pany. 

To this habit of continuity of attention, tracing 
the first simple idea through its remoter con- 
sequences, Galileo and Newton owed many of 
their discoveries. It was one evening in the 
cathedral of Pisa, that Galileo observed the vibra- 
tions of a brass lustre pendent from the vaulted 
roof, which had been left swinging by one of the 
vergers ; the habitual meditation of genius com- 
bined with an ordinary accident a new idea of 
science, and hence, conceived the invention of 
measuring time by the medium of a pendulum. 
Who but a genius of this order, sitting in his 
orchard, and being struck by the fall of an apple, 
could have discovered a new quality in matter 
by t!ie system of gravitation; or have imagined, 
while viewing boys blowing soap-bladders, the 
properties of light, and then anatomised a ray! 
It was the same principle which led Franklin 
when on board a ship, observing a partial still- 
ness in the waves, when they threw down water 
B which had been used for culinary purposes, to 
i the discovery of the wonderful property in oil 
' '~ m 2 



138 THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 

of calming the agitated ocean, and many a ship 
has been preserved in tempestuous weather, or 
a landing facilitated on a dan&erous surf, by this 
simple meditation of genius. 

In the stillness of meditation the mind of 
genius must be frequently thrown ; it is a kind 
of darkness which hides from us al! surrounding 
objects, even in the light of day. This is the 
first state of existence in genius. — In Cicero, 
on Old Age, we' find Cato admiring that Caius 
Sulpitius Gallup who when he sat down to 
write in the morning was surprised by the evening, 
and when he took up his pen in the evening, was 
surprized by the appearance of the morning. 
Socrates has remained a whole day in immovea- 
ble meditation, his eyes and countenance direct- 
ed to one spot as if in the stillness of death. 
La Fontaine, when writing his comic tales, has 
been observed early in the morning and late in 
the evening, in the same recumbent posture under 
the same tree. This quiescent state is a sort tif 
enthusiasm, and renders every thing that sur- 
rounds us as distant as if an immense interval 
separated us from the scene. Poggius has told 
us of Dante, that he indulged his meditations 
more strongly than any man he knew ; and when 
once deeply engaged in reading he seemed to live 



THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS. 539 

only in his ideas. The poet went to view a pub- 
lic procession, and having entered a bookseller's 
shop, taking up a^ook he sunk into a reverie ; on 
his return he declared that he had neither seen 
nor heard a single occurrence in the public exhi- 
bition which had passed before him. It has been 
told of a modern astronomer, that one summer 
night when he was withdrawing to his chamber, the 
brightness of the heavens showed a phenomenon. 
He passed the whole night in observing it ; and 
when they came to him early/n'n the morning, 
and found him in the same attitude, he said, like 
one who had been recollecting his thoughts for a 
few moments, " It must be thus; but I'll £0 to 
bed before it is late." He had gazed the entire 
night in meditation, and was not aware of it. 

There is nothing incredible in the stories re- 
lated of some who have experienced this en- 
tranced state, in a very extraordinary degree ; 
that ecstasy in study, where the mind deliciously 
inebriated with the object it contemplates, feels 
nothing, from the excess of feeling, as a philo- 
sopher well describes it : — Archimedes, involved 
in the investigation of mathematical truth, and 
the painters Protogenes and Parmeggiano, found 
their senses locked up as it were in meditation, 
so as to be incapable of withdrawing themselves 



X40 THE MEDITATIONS OF . GENIUS. 

from their work even in the midst of the terrors 
and storming of the place by the enemy. Mari- 
no was so absorbed in the composition of his 
" Adonis," that he suffered his leg to be burnt 
for some time before the pain grew stronger than 
the intellectual pleasure of his imagination. 
Thomas, an intense thinker, would sit for hours 
against a hedge, composing with a low voice, 
taking the same pinch of snuff for half an hour 
together, without being aware that it had long 
disappeared; when he quitted his apartment, 
after prolonging his studies there, a visible alter- 
ation was observed in his person, and the agi- 
tation of his recent thoughts was still traced in 
his air and manner. With what eloquent truth 
has Buffon described those reveries of the stu- 
dent, which compress his day, and mark the 
hours by the sensations of minutes. " Inven- 
tion," he says, " depends on patience ; contem- 
plate your subject long, it will gradually unfold 
till a sort of electric spark convulses for a mo- 
ment the brain, and spreads down to the very 
heart a glow of irritation. Then come the luxu- 
ries of genius, the true hours for production and 
composition ; hours so delightful that I have 
spent twelve or fourteen successively at my 
writing-desk, and still been in a state of plea- 




THE MEDITATIONS OF GENIUS, J4 t 

This eager delight of pursuing his study, and 
this impatience of interruption in the pursuit, are 
finely described by Milton in a letter to his friend 
Deodati. 

" Such is the character of my mind, that no 
delay, none of the ordinary cessations (for rest 
or otherwise) no, I had nearly said, care or 
thinking of the very subject, can hold me back 
from being hurried on to the destined point, and 
from completing the great circuit, as it were, of 
the study in which I am engaged."* 

Such is the picture of genius, viewed in the 
stillness of meditation, but there is yet a more 
excited state, — when, as if consciousness were 
mixing with its reveries, in the allusion of a 
scene, a person, a passion, the emotions of the 
soul affect even the organs of sense. It is ex- 
perienced in the moments the man of genius is 
producing ; these are the hours of inspiration, 
and this is the gentle enthusiasm of genius ! 

* Meum sic est ingenium, nulla ut mora, nulla quies, nulla 
erme illius rei cura aut cogitatlo distineat, quoad pervadam 
quo feror, et grandem aliquem studiorum meorum quasi 
periodura conficiara." 



( 142 ) 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 



A. state of mind occurs in the most active ope- 
rations of genius, which the term reverie in- 
adequately indicates ; metaphysical distinctions 
but ill describe it, and popular language affords 
no terms for those faculties and feelings which 
escape the observation of the multitude who are 
not affected by the phenomenon. 

The illusion of a drama, over persons of great 
sensibility, where all the senses are excited by 
a mixture of reality with imagination, is expe- 
rienced by men of genius in their own vivified 
ideal world ; real emotions are raised by fiction. 
In a scene, apparently passing in their presence, 
where the whole train of circumstances succeeds 
in all the continuity of nature, and a sort of real 
existences appear to rise up before them, they 
perceive themselves spectators or actors, feel 
their sympathies excited, and involuntarily use 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 143 

language and gestures, while the exterior organs 
of sense are visibly affected ; not that they are 
spectators and actors, nor that the scene exists. 
In this equivocal state, the enthusiast of genius 
produces his master-pieces. This waking dream 
is distinct from reverie, where our thoughts 
wandering without connection, the faint impres- 
sions are so evanescent as to occur without even 
being recollected. Not so when one closely 
pursued act of meditation carries the enthusiast 
of genius beyond the precinct of actual exist- 
ence, while this act of contemplation makes the 
thing contemplated. He is now the busy painter 
of a world which he himself only views ; alone 
he hears, he sees, he touches, he laughs and 
weeps ; his brows and lips, and his very limbs 
move. Poets and even painters, who as Lord 
Bacon describes witches, " are imaginative," 
have often involuntarily betrayed in the act of 
composition those gestures which accompany 
this enthusiasm. Quintillian has nobly compared 
u them to the lashings of the lion's tail preparing 
to combat. Even actors of genius have accus- 
tomed themselves to walk on the stage for an 
hour before the curtain was drawn, to fill their 
minds with all the phantom's of the drama, to 
personify, to catch the passion, to speak to others, 



144 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

to do all that a man of genius would have viewed 
in the subject. 

Aware of this peculiar faculty so prevalent in 
the more vivid exercise of genius, Lord Kaimes 
seems to have been the first who, in a work on 
criticism, attempted to name it the ideal pre- 
sence, to distinguish it from the real presence of 
things; it has been called the representative 
faculty, the imaginative state, &c. Call it what 
we will, no term opens to us the invisible mode 
of its operations, or expresses its variable nature. 
Conscious of the existence of such a faculty, 
our critic perceived that the conception of it is 
by no means clear when described in words. 
Has not the difference of any actual thing and 
its image in a glass perplexed some philosophers ? 
and it is well known how far the ideal philo- 
sophy has been carried. "All are pictures, 
alike painted on the retina, or optical senso- 
rium!" exclaimed the enthusiast Barry, who 
only saw pictures in nature and nature in pic- 
tures. 

Cold and barren tempers without imagination* 
whose impressions of objects never rise beyond 
those of memory and reflection, which know only 
to compare, and not to excite, will smile at this 






THE ENTH USIASM OF GEJSIU5. 14$ 

equivocal state of the ideal presence ; yet it is 
a real one to the enthusiast of genius, and. it is 
his happiest and peculiar condition — without 
this power no metaphysical aid, no art to be 
taught him, no mastery of talent shall avail him ; 
unblest with it the votary shall find each sacrifice 
lying cold on the altar, for no accepting flame 
from heaven shall kindle it. 

This enthusiasm indeed can only be discovered 
by men of genius themselves, yet when most 
under its influence, they can least perceive it, as 
the eye which sees all things cannot view itself; 
and to trace this invisible operation, this wamth 
on the nerve, were to search for the principle of 
life which found would cease to be life. There 
is however something of reality in this state of 
tlie ideal presence ; for the most familiar instan- 
ces show that the nerves of each external sense 
are put in motion by the idea of the object, as if 
the real object had been presented to it ; the dif- 
ference is only in the degree. Thus the exterior 
senses are more concerned in the ideal world 
than at first appears ; we thrill at even the idea 
of any thing that makes us shudder, and only 
imagining it often produces a real pain. A curi- 
ous consequence flows from this principle : 
Milton, lingering amidst the freshness of nature 

N 



146 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

in Eden, felt all the delights of those elements 
with which he was creating; his nerves moved 
with the images which excited them. The fierce 
and wild Dante amidst the abysses of his Inferno, 
must often have been startled by its horrors, and 
often left his bitter and gloomy spirit in the 
stings he inflicted on the great criminal. The 
moving nerves then of the man of genius are 
a reality; he sees, he hears, he feels by each. 
How mysterious to us is the operation of this 
faculty : a Homer and a Richardson,* like Na- 
ture, open a volume large as life itself — embracing 
a circuit of human existence ! 

Can we doubt of the reality of this faculty, 
when the visible and- outward frame of the man 
of genius bears witness to its presence ? When 
Fielding said "I do not doubt but the most ! 
pathetic and affecting scenes have been writ 
with tears," he probably drew that discovery 
from an inverse feeling to his own. Fielding 
would have been gratified to have confirmed the 

* Richardson assembles a family about him, writing down 
what they said, seeing their very manner of saying, living with 
iliem as often and as long as he wills — with such a personal 
unity, that an ingenius lawyer once told me that he required 
no stronger evidence of a fact in any court of law than a cir« 
<;um$tantiaf scene in Richardson. 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 14. 

observation by facts which never reached him. 
Metastasio, in writing the ninth scene of the 
second act of his Olympiad, found himself 
suddenly moved — shedding tears. The ima- 
gined sorrows inspired real tears ; and they after- 
wards proved contagious. Had our poet not 
perpetuated his surprise by an interesting sonnet, 
the circumstance had passed away with the 
emotion, as many such have. Alfieri, the most 
energetic poet of modern times, having com- 
posed, without a pause, the whole of an act, 
noted in the margin — " Written under a paroxysm 
of enthusiasm, and while shedding a flood of 
tears." The impressions which the frame ex- 
periences in this state, leave deeper traces 
behind them than those of reverie. The tre- 
mors of Dryden, after having written an ode 3 
a circumstance accidentally preserved, were not 
unusual with him — for in the preface to his 
Tales he tells us, that " in translating Homer 
he found greater pleasure than in Virgil; but 
it was not a pleasure without pain ; the con- 
tinual agitation of the spirits must needs be a 
weakener to any constitution, especially in age, 
and many pauses are required for refreshment 
betwixt the heats." We find Metastasio, like 
others of the brotherhood, susceptible of this 
state, complaining of his sufferings during the 



148 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

poetical aeslus. " When I apply with attention^ 
the nerves of my sensorium are put into a vio- 
lent tumult ; I grow as red as a drunkard, and 
am obliged to quit my work." When Buffon 
was absorbed on a subject which presented 
great objections to his opinions, he felt his head 
burn, and saw his countenance flushed ; and this 
was a warning for him to suspend his attention. 
Gray could never compose voluntarily ; his 
genius resembled the armed apparition in Shake* 
speare's master tragedy. " He would not be 
commanded," as we are told by Mr. Mathias. 
When he wished to compose the Installation 
Ode, for a considerable time he felt himself 
without the power to begin it : a friend calling 
on him, Gray flung open his door hastily, and 
in a hurried voice and tone exclaiming, in the 
first verse of that ode, 

■' Hence, avaunt ! 'tis holy ground !" — 

his friend started at the disordered appearance 
of the bard, whose orgasm had disturbed his 
very air and countenance, till he recovered him- 
self. Listen to one labouring with all the magic 
of the spell. Madam Roland has thus power- 
fully described the ideal presence in her first 
readings of Telemachus and Tasso: — " My 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 149 

respiration rose, I felt a rapid fire colouring my 
face and my voice changing had betrayed my 
agitation. I was Eucharis for Telemachus, and 
Erminia for Tancred. However, during this 
perfect transformation, I did not yet think that 
I myself was any thing, for any one : the whole 
had no connection with myself. I sought for 
nothing around me ; I was them ; I saw only 
the objects which existed for them ; it was a 
dream, without being awakened." The effect 
which the study of Plutarch's illustrious men 
produced on the mighty mind of Alfieri, during 
a whole winter, while he lived as it were among 
the heroes of antiquity, he has himself told. 
Alfieri wept and raved with grief and indigna- 
tion that he was born under a government which 
favoured no Roman heroes nor sages 5 as often 
as he was struck with the great actions of these 
great men, in his extreme agitation he rose 
from his seat like one possessed. The feeling 
of genius in Alfieri was suppressed for more 
than twenty years, by the discouragement of 
his uncle ; but as the natural temperament can- 
not be crushed out of the soul of genius, he 
was a poet without writing a single verse ; and 
as a great poet, the ideal presence at times be^ 
came ungovernable and verging to madness* 
In traversing the wilds of Arragon, his emo- 
n 2 



|50 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

tions, he says, would certainly have given birth 
to poetry, could he have expressed himself in 
verse. It was a complete state of the imagina- 
tive existence, or this ideal presence ; for he 
proceeded along the wilds of Arragon in a re- 
verie, weeping and laughing by turns. He con- 
sidered this as a folly, because it ended in 
nothing but in laughter and tears. He was 
not aware that he was then yielding to a demon- 
stration, could he have judged of himself, that 
he possessed those dispositions of mind and 
energy of passion which form the poetical char- 
acter. 

Genius creates by a single conception ; the 
statuary conceives the statue at once, which he 
afterwards executes by the slow process of art ; 
and the architect contrives a whole palace in an 
instant. In a single principle, opening as it were 
on a sudden to genius, a great and new system of 
things is discovered. It has happened, some- 
times, that this single conception, rushing over 
the whole concentrated soul of genius, has agi- 
tated the frame convulsively ; it comes like a 
whispered secret from Nature. When Malle- 
branche first took up Descartes's treatise on Man, 
the germ of his own subsequent philosophic sys- 
tem, such was his intense feeling, that a violent 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 151 

palpitation of the heart, more than onee, obliged 
him to lay down the volume. When the first idea 
of the Essay on the Arts and Sciences rushed on 
the mind of Rousseau, a feverish symptom in his 
nervous system approached to a slight delirium : 
stopping under an oak, he wrote with a pencil the 
Prosopopeiae of Fabricius. — " I still remember 
my solitary transport at the discovery of a philo- 
sophical argument against the doctrine of tran- 
substantiation," exclaimed Gibbon in his Me- 
moirs. 

This quick sensibility of genius has suppressed 
the voices of poets in reciting their most pathetic 
passages. — Thomson was so oppressed by a pas- 
sage in Virgil or Milton, when he attempted to 
read, that " his voice sunk in ill-articulated 
sounds from the bottom of his breast." The 
tremulous figure of the ancient Sybil appears to 
have been viewed in that land of the Muses, by 
the energetic description of Paulus Jovius of the 
impetus and afflatus of one of the Italian impro- 
visator!, some of whom, I have heard from one 
present at a similar exhibition, have not degener- 
ated in poetic inspiration, nor in its corporeal ex- 
citement. " His eyes fixed downwards, kindle, 
as he gives utterance to his effusions, the moist 
drops flow down his cheeks, the veins of his fore- 



152 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

head swell, and wonderfully his learned ears, as 
it were, abstracted and intent, moderate each im- 
pulse of his flowing numbers."* 

This enthusiasm throws the man of genius into 
those reveries where, amidst Nature, while others 
are terrified at destruction, he can only view Na- 
ture herself. The mind of Pliny, to add one 
more chapter to his mighty scroll, sought her 
amidst the volcano in which he perished. Vernet 
was on board a ship in the midst of a raging tem- 
pest, and all hope was given up : the astonished 
captain beheld the artist of genius, his pencil in 
his hand, in calm enthusiasm, sketching the ter- 
rible world of waters — studying the wave that was 
rising to devour him. 

There is a tender enthusiasm in the elevated 
studies of antiquity, in which the ideal presence 
or the imaginative existence is seen prevailing 
over the mind. It is finely said by Livy, that 
<' in contemplating antiquity, the mind itself be- 
comes antique." Amidst the monuments of great 
and departed nations, our imagination is touched 

* The passage is curious. — " Canenti defixi exardent oculi, 
sudores manant, frontis vena? contumescunt, et quod mirum 
est, eruditae aures tanquam alienee et intenta? omnem impetum 
ptro-ftuentium numerorum esactifsima ratione moderantur." 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 153 

by the grandeur of local impressions, and the vi- 
vid associations of the manners, the arts, and the 
individuals, of a great people. Men of genius 
have roved amidst the awful ruins till the ideal 
presence has fondly built up the city anew, and 
have become Romans in the Rome of two thou- 
sand years past. Pomponius Laetus, who devoted 
his life to this study, was constantly seen wander- 
ing amidst the vestiges of this " throne of the 
world :" there, in many a reverie, as his eye rest- 
ed on the mutilated arch and the broken column, 
he stopped to muse, and dropt tears in the ideal 
presence of Rome and of the Romans. Another 
enthusiast of this class was Bosius, who sought be- 
neath Rome for another Rome, in those cata- 
combs built by the early Christians, for their asy- 
lum and their sepulchres. His work of " Roma 
Sotteraner" is the production of a subterraneous 
life, passed in fervent and perilous labours. Tak- 
ing with him a hermit's meal for the week, this 
new Pliny often descended into the bowels of the 
earth, by lamp-light, clearing away the sand and 
ruins, till some tomb broke forth, or some in- 
scription became legible : accompanied by some 
friend whom his enthusiasm had inspired with his 
own sympathy, here he dictated his notes, tracing 
the mouldering sculpture, and catching the fading 
picture. Thrown back into the primitive ages of 



|54 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

Christianity, amidst the local impressions, the 
historian of the Christian catacombs collected the 
memorials of an age and of a race, which were 
hidden beneath the earth. 

Werner, the mineralogist, celebrated for his 
lectures, by some accounts transmitted by his au- 
ditors, appears to have exercised this faculty. 
Werner often said that " he always depended on 
the muse for inspiration." His unwritten lecture 
was a reverie — till kindling in his progress, blend- 
ing science and imagination in the grandeur of his 
conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about 
him the very elements of Nature, his spirit seem- 
ed to be hovering over the waters and the strata. 

It is this enthusiasm which inconceivably 
fills the mind of genius in all great and solemn 
operations : it is an agitation in calmness, and is 
required not only in the fine arts, but wherever 
a great and continued exertion of the soul must 
be employed. It was experienced by De Thou, 
the historian, when after his morning prayers 
he always added another to implore the Divinity 
to purify his heart from partiality and hatred, 
and to open his spirit in developing the truth, 
amidst the contending factions of his times ; 
and by Haydn? when employed in his " Crea- 



THE ENTHUSIASM OE GENIUS. 155 

tion," earnestly addressing the Creator ere he 
struck his instrument. In moments like these, 
man becomes a perfect unity — one thought and 
one act, abstracted from all other thoughts and 
all other acts. It was felt by Gray in his lof- 
tiest excursions, and is perhaps the same power 
which impels the villager, when, to overcome 
his rivals in a contest for leaping, he retires 
back some steps, collects all exertion into his 
mind, and clears the eventful bound. One of 
our Admirals in the reign of Elizabeth, held as 
a maxim, that a height of passion, amounting 
to phrenzy, was necessary to qualify a man for 
that place ; and Nelson, decorated by all his 
honours about him, on the day of battle, at the 
sight of those emblems of glory emulated him- 
self. This enthusiasm was necessary and effec- 
tive for his genius. 

This enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has 
been by the operation of the imaginative exis- 
tence becomes a state of perturbed feeling, 
and can only be distinguished from a disordered 
intellect by the power of volition, in a sound 
mind, of withdrawing from the ideal world into 
the world of sense. It is but a step which car- 
ries us from the wanderings of fancy into the 
aberrations of delirium, 



156 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

« With curious art the brain too finely wrought 
Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought ; 
Constant attention wears the active mind, 
Blots out her powers, and leaves a blank behind— 
The greatest genius to this fate may bow." 

Churchill. 



There may be an agony in thought which only 
deep thinkers experience. The terrible effects 
of metaphysical studies on Beattie, has been told 
by himself. — " Since the Essay on Truth was 
printed in quarto, I have never dared to read it 
over. I durst not even read the sheets to see 
whether there were any errors in the print, and 
was obliged to get a friend to do that office for 
me. These studies came in time to have dread- 
ful effects upon my nervous system ; and I cannot 
read what I then wrote without some degree of 
horror, because it recalls to my mind the horrors 
that I have sometimes felt after passing a long 
evening in those severe studies." Goldoni, after 
a rash exertion of writing sixteen plays in a year, 
confesses he paid the penalty of the folly ; he 
flew to Genoa, leading a life of delicious vacuity j 
to pass the day without doing any thing, was all 
the enjoyment he was now capable of feeling. 
But long after he said, " I felt at that time, and 
have ever since continued to feel, the consequence 
of that exhaustion of spirits I sustained in com- 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GEMUS. 157 

posing ray sixteen comedies." Boerhaave has re- 
lated of himself, that having imprudently indulged 
in intense thought on a particular subject, he did 
not close his eyes for six weeks after : and Tissot, 
in his work on the health of men of letters, 
abounds in similar cases, where a complete stupor 
has affected the unhappy student for a period of 
six months. 

Assuredly the finest geniuses could not always 
withdraw themselves from that intensely interest- 
ing train of ideas, which we have shown has not 
been removed from about them by even the vio- 
lent stimuli of exterior objects ; the scenical illu- 
sion, — the being of their passion,— the invisible 
existences repeatedly endowed by them with a 
vital force, have still hung before their eyes. It 
was in this state that Petrarch found himself in 
that minute narrative of a vision in which Laura 
appeared to him ; and Tasso in the lofty conver- 
sations he held with a spirit that glided towards 
him on the beams of the sun : and thus, Malle- 
branche listening to the voice of God within him ; 
jor Lord Herbert on his knees, in the stillness of 
the sky ; or Paschal starting at times at an abyss 
opening by his side. Descartes, when young, 
and in a country seclusion, his brain exhausted 
with meditation, and his imagination heated to 



158 2 HE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. , 

excess, beard a voice in the air which called him 
to pursue the search of truth ; he never doubted 
the vision, and this dream in the delirium of 
genius charmed him even in his after-studies. 
Our Collins and Cowper were often thrown into 
that extraordinary state of mind, when the ideal 
presence converted them into visionaries ; and 
their illusions were as strong as Swedenburgh's, 
who saw heaven on earth in the glittering streets 
of his New Jerusalem, and Cardan's, when he so 
carefully observed a number of little armed men 
at his feet; and Benvenuto Cellini, whose vivid 
imagination and glorious egotism so frequently 
contemplated " a resplendent light hovering over 
his shadow." 

Yet what less than enthusiasm is the purchase- 
price of high passion and invention ? Perhaps 
never has there been a man of genius of this rare 
cast, who has not betrayed early in youth the 
ebullitions of the imagination in some oujtward 
action at that period, when the illusions of life are 
more real to them than its realities. A slight de- 
rangement of our accustomed habits, a little per- 
turbation of the faculties, and a romantic tinge on 
the feelings, give no indifferent promise of genius ; 
of that generous temper which knows nothing of 
the baseness of mankind, unsatisfied, and raging 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. \frj 

with a devouring eagerness for the aliment it has 
not yet found ; to perfect some glorious design, 
to charm the world, or make it happier. Often 
we hear from the confessions of men of genius, of 
their having indulged in the puerile state the most 
noble, the most delightful, the most impossible 
projects ; and if age ridicules the imaginative ex- 
istence of its youth, be assured that it is the de- 
cline of its genius. That virtuous and jtender 
enthusiast, Fenelon, in his early youth, troubled 
his friends with a classical and religious reverie. 
He was on the point of quitting them to restore 
the independence of Greece, in the character of a 
missionary, and to collect the relics of antiquity 
with the taste of a classical antiquary. The Pe- 
loponnesus opened to him the Church of Corinth, 
where St. Paul preached, the Piraeus where So- 
crates conversed; while the latent poet was to 
pluck laurels from Delphos, and rove amidst the 
amenites of Tempe. Such was the influence of 
t-ie ideal presence ! and barren will be his imagin- 
ation, and luckless his fortune, who, claiming 
the honours of genius, has never been touched by 
such a temporary delirium. 

To this enthusiasm, and to this alone, can we 
attribute the self-immolation of men of genius. 
Mighty and laborious works have been pursued, 



160 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

as a forlorn hope, at the certain destruction of 
the fortune of the individual. The fate of Cas- 
telPs Lexicon,* of Bloch's magnificent work on 
Fishes, and other great and similar labours, attest 
the enthusiasm which accompanied their pro- 
gress. They have sealed their works with their 
blood : they have silently borne the pangs of dis- 
ease ; they have barred themselves from the pur- 
suits of fortune ; they have torn themselves away 
from all they loved in life, patiently suffering 
these self-denials, to escape from those interrup- 
tions and impediments to their studies. Martyrs 
of literature and art, they behold in their solitude 
that halo of immortality over their studious heads, 
which is a reality to the visionary of glory. Mil- 
ton would not desist from proceeding with one oi 
his works, although warned by the physician 
the certain loss of his sight ; he declared he pre- 
ferred his duty to his eyes, and doubtless his farm 
to his comfort. Anthony Wood, to preserve th< 



* Castell lost 12000J. by this great work ; and gave away 
copies, while the rest rotted at home. He exhibits a curious 
picture of literary labour in bis preface—" As for myself, i 
have been unceasingly occupied for such a number of year; 
in tli is mass — Molendino he calls them — that day seemed 
it were a holiday in which I have not laboured so much as six- 
teen or eighteen hours in these enlarging Lexicons and Poly- 
glot Bibles." Bloch expended all his fortune in his splendid 
werk. 



ars 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 161 

lives of others, voluntarily resigned his own to 
cloistered studies ; nor did the literary passion de- 
sert him in his last moments, when with his dying 
hands he still grasped his beloved papers, and his 
last mortal thoughts dwelt on his Athence Oxoni- 
enses.* Moreri, the founder of our great biogra- 
phical collections, conceived the design with such 
enthusiasm, and found such voluptuousness in the 
labour, that he willingly withdrew from the popu- 
lar celebrity he had acquired as a preacher, and 
the preferment which a minister of state, in whose 
house he resided, would have opened to his views. 
After the first edition of his Historical Dictionary, 
he had nothing so much at heart as its improve- 
ment. His unyielding application was converting 
labour into death ; but collecting his last renovat- 
ed vigour, with his dying hands he gave the vo- 
lume to the world, though he did not live to wit- 
ness even its publication. All objects in life 
appeared mean to him compared with that ex- 
alted delight of addressing to the literary men of 
his age, the history of their brothers. The same 
enthusiasm consumes the pupils of art devoured 
by their own ardour. The young and classical 
sculptor, who raised the statue of Charles II. 
placed in the centre of the Royal Exchange^ 

* See Calamities of Authors, vol. i. p. 243= 
o2 



102 'IHE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIU& 

was, in the midst of his work, advised by his 
medical friends to desist from marble ; for the 
energy of his labour, with the strong excitement 
of his feelings, already had made fatal inroads in 
his constitution. But he was willing, he said, to 
die at the foot of his statue. The statue was rais- 
ed, and the young sculptor, with the shining eyes 
and hectic blush of consumption, beheld it there 
— returned home — and shortly was no more. 
Drouais, a pupil of David, the French painter, 
was a youth of fortune, but the solitary pleasure 
of his youth was his devotion to Raphael ; he 
was at his studies at four in the morning till 
night ; " Painting, or Nothing !" was the cry of 
this enthusiast of elegance ; " First fame, then 
amusement," was another. His sensibility was 
great as his enthusiasm ; and he cut in pieces 
the picture for which David declared he would 
inevitably obtain the prize. , " I have had my 
reward in your approbation ; but next year I 
shall feel more certain of deserving it," was the 
reply of this young enthusiast. Afterwards he 
astonished Paris with liis Marius — but while en- 
gaged on a subject which he could never quit, 
the principle of life itself was drying up in 
his veins Henry Headly end Kirke White were 
the early victims of the enthusiasm of study 5 



THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. iq% 

and are mourned for ever by the few who are 
organised like themselves. 

" 'Twas thine own genius gave the fatal blow, 
And helped to plant the wound that laid thee low j 
So the struck eagle, stretched upon the plain 
No more through rolling clouds to soar again. 
Viewed his own feather on the fatal dart, 
And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart ; 
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel 
He nursed the piniou which impelled the steel, 
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest, 
Drank the last life-drop of his bleeding breast." 

English Bards and Scotch Review en. 

Thus comes the shadow of death among those 
who are existing with more than life about them. 
Yet " there is no celebrity for the artist," said 
Gesner, " if the love of his own heart does not 
become a vehement passion ; if the hours he 
employs to cultivate it are not for him the most 
delicious ones of his life ; if study becomes not 
his true existence and his first happiness ; if the 
society of his brothers in art is not that which 
most pleases him ; if even in the night-time the 
ideas of his art do not occupy his vigils or his 
dreams ; if in the morning he flies not to his 
work with a new rapture. These are the marks 
of him who labours for true glory and posterity ; 
but if he seek only to please the taste of his age, 



164 THE ENTHUSIASM OF GENIUS. 

his works will not kindle the desires nor touch 
the hearts of those who love the arts and the 
artists." 

Unaccompanied by enthusiasm, genius will 
produce nothing but uninteresting works of art; 
not a work of art, resembling the dove of Archi- 
das, which other artists beheld flying, but could 
not make another dove to meet it in the air. 
Enthusiasm is the secret spirit which hovers 
over the production of genius, throwing the rea- 
der of a book, or the spectator of a statue, into 
the very ideal presence whence these works have 
really originated. A great work always leaves us 
in a state of musing. 



{ 165 ) 



CHAPTER IX, 



LITERARY JEALOUSY 



Jealousy, long declared to be the offspring of 
little minds, is not, however, restricted to them ; 
it fiercely rages in the literary republic, among 
the Senate and the Order of Knights, as well as 
the people. In that curious self-description 
which Linnaeus comprised in a single page, writ- 
ten with the precision of a naturalist, that great 
man discovered that his constitution was liable 
to be afflicted with jealousy. Literary jealousy 
seems often proportioned to the degree of 
genius ; the shadowy and equivocal claims of 
literary honour is the real cause of this terrible 
fear ; in cases where the object is more palpable 
and definite, and the pre-eminence is more uni- 
versal, than intellectual excellence can be, jeal- 
ousy will not so strongly affect the claimant for 
our admiration. The most beautiful woman, in 
the age of beauty 3 will be rarely jealous : seldom 



166 LITERARY JEALOUSY. 



she encounters a rival ; and while her claims exist. 
who can contend with a fine feature or a dissolv- 
ing glance ? But a man of genius has no other 
existence than in the opinion of the world; a 
divided empire would obscure him, a contested 
ene might annihilate him. 






! 



The lives of authors and artists exhibit a most 
painful disease in that jealousy which is the per- 
petual fever of their existence. Why does Plato 
never mention Zenophon, and why doesZenophon 
inveigh against Plato, studiously collecting every 
little report which may detract from his fame ? 
They wrote on the same subject ! Why did Cor 
neille, tottering on the grave, when Racine con- 
sulted him on his first tragedy, advise the author 
never to write another? Why does Voltaire 
continually detract from the sublimity of Corneille, 
the sweetness of Racine, and the fire of Crehil- 
lon ? Why, when Boccaccio sent to Petrarch a 
copy of Dante, declaring that the work was like 
a first light which had illuminated his mind, die 
Petrarch coldly observe that he had not been 
anxious to inquire after it, having intended to com- 
pose in the vernacular idiom and not wishing to be 
considered as a plagiary ; while he only allowsDan- 
te's superiority from having written in the vulgar 
idiom, which he did not think was an enviable, 






LITERARY JEALOUSY. 167 

but an inferior merit. Thus frigidly Petrarch 
took the altitude of the solitary j£tna before him, 
in the " Inferno," while he shrunk into himself 
with the painful consciousness of the existence of 
another poet, who obscured his own solitary ma- 
jesty. Why is Waller silent on the merits of 
Cowley, and why does he not give one verse to 
return the praise with which Dryden honoured 
him, while he is warm in panegyric on Beaumont 
and Fletcher, on Sandys, Ware, and D'Avenant ? 
Because of some of these their species of com- 
position was different from his own, and the rest 
he could not fear. 

The moral feeling has often been found too 
■weak to temper the malignancy of literary jeal- 
ousy, and has led some men of genius to an in- 
credible excess. A memorable and recent ex- 
ample offers in the history of the two brothers, 
Dr. William, and John Hunter, both great cha- 
racters, fitted to be rivals, but Nature, it was 
imagined, in the tenderness of blood had placed 
a bar to rivalry. John, without any determined 
pursuit in his youth, was received by his brother 
at the height of his celebrity ; the Doctor initi- 
ated him into his school ; they performed their 
experiments together ; and William Hunter was 
the first to announce to the world the great 



I6g LITERARY JEALOUSY. 

genius of his brother. After this close connec- 
tion in all their studies and discoveries, Dr. Wil- 
liam Hunter published his magnificent work — 
the proud favourite of his heart, the assertor of 
his fame. Was it credible that the genius of the 
celebrated anatomist, which had been nursed 
under the wing of his brother, -should turn on 
that wing to clip it? John Hunter put in his 
claim to the chief discovery ; it was answered 
by his brother. The Royal Society, to whom 
they appealed, concealed the documents of this 
unnatural feud. The blow was felt, and the jeal- 
ousy of literary honour for ever separated the 
brothers, and the brothers of genius.* 

In the jealousy of genius, however, there is a 
peculiar case, where the fever rages not in its 
malignancy, yet silently consumes. Even the 
man of genius of the gentlest temper dies under 
its slow wastings ; and this infection may happen 
among dear friends, when a man of genius loses 
that self-opinion which animated his solitary 
labours and constituted his happiness — when he 
views himself at the height of his class, suddenly 
eclipsed by another great genius. It is then the 
morbid sensibility, acting on so delicate a frame, 

See Dr. Adams's interesting life of Mr. John Hunter. 



LITERARY JEALOUSY. 169 

feels as if under the old witchcraft of tying the 
knot on the nuptial day, — the faculties are sud- 
denly extinct by the very imagination. This 
is the jealousy not of hatred, but of despair. A 
curious case of this kind appears in the anecdote 
of the Spanish artist Castillo, a man distinguished 
by every amiable disposition ; he was the great 
painter of Seville. When some of Morillo's 
paintings were shown to him, who seems to have 
been his nephew, he stood in meek astonishment 
before them, and when he recovered his voice, 
turning away, he exclaimed with a sigh, Yd murio 
Castillo! Castillo is no more ! Returning home 
the stricken genius relinquished his pencil, and 
pined away in hopelessness. 



( 170 ) 



CHAPTER X. 



WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 



Among men of genius that want of mutual es- 
teem, usually attributed to envy or jealousy, often 
originates in a deficiency of analogous ideas, or 
sympathy, in the parties. On this principle seve- 
ral curious phenomena in the history of genius 
may be explained. 

Every man of genius has a manner of his own ; 
a mode of thinking and a habit of style ; and usu- 
ally decides on a work as it approximates or 
varies from his own. When one great author 
depreciates another it has often no worse source 
than his own taste. The witty Cowly despised 
the natural Chaucer ; the cold classical Boileau 
the rough sublimity of Crebillon ; the refining 
Marivaux the familiar Moliere Fielding ridiculed 
Richardson, whose manner so strongly contrasted 
with his own ; and Richardson contemned Field- 
ing and declared he would not last. Cumberland 






WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 17J 

escaped a fit of unforgiveness, not living to read 
his own character by Bishop Watson, whose logi- 
cal head tried the lighter elegancies of that po- 
lished man by his own nervous genius, destitute 
of whatever was beautiful in taste. There was 
no envy in the breast of Johnson when he advis- 
ed Mrs. Thrale not to purchase Gray's Letters as 
trifling and dull, no more than in Gray himself 
when he sunk the poetical character of Shenstone, 
his simplicity and purity of feeling, by an image 
of ludicrous contempt. The deficient sympathy 
in these men of genius, for modes of feeling op- 
posite to their own, was the real cause of their 
opinions ; and thus it happens that even superior 
genius is so often liable to be unjust and false in 
its decisions. 

The same principle operates still more strik- 
ingly in the remarkable contempt of men of geni- 
us for those pursuits and the pursuers, which 
require talents quite distinct from their own, with 
a cast of mind thrown by nature into another 
mould. Hence we must not be surprised at the 
antipathies of Selden and Locke, of Longerue and 
Buffon, and this class of genius, against poetry 
and poets : while on the other side, these under- 
value the pursuits of the antiquary, the naturalist, 
and the metaphysician, by their own favourite 



I 72 WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 

course of imagination. We can only understand 
in the degree we comprehend \ and in both these 
cases the parties will be iound quite deficient in 
those qualities of genius which constitute the ex- 
cellence of the other. A professor of polite 
literature condemned the study of botany, as 
adapted to mediocrity of talent and only de- 
manding patience ; but Linnaeus showed how a 
man of genius becomes a creator even in a sci- 
ence which seems to depend only on order and 
method. It will not be a question with some 
whether a man must be endowed with the ener- 
gy and aptitude of genius, to excel in antiquari- 
anism, in natural history, he. ; and that the preju- 
dices raised against the claims of such to the 
honours of genius have probably arisen from the 
secluded nature of their pursuits, and the little 
knowledge the men of wit and imagination have. 
of these persons, who live in a society of their 
own. On this subject a very curious circumstance 
has been revealed of Peiresc, whose enthusiasm 
for science was long felt throughout Europe ; his 
name was known in every country, and his death 
was lamented in forty languages ; yet was this great 
man unknown to several men of genius in his own 
country ; Rochefoucauld declared he had never 
heard of his name, and Malherbe wondered why 
his death created so universal a sensation, Thus 



WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM. 173 

we see the classes of literature, like the planets 
of Heaven, revolving like distinct worlds ; and it 
would not be less absurd for the inhabitants of 
Venus to treat with contempt the powers and 
faculties of those of Jupiter, than it is for the 
men of wit and imagination, those of the men 
of knowledge and curiosity. They are incapa- 
ble of exerting the peculiar qualities which give 
a real value to these pursuits, and therefore they 
must remain ignorant of their nature and their 
result. 

I* is not then always envy or jealousy which 
induce men of genius to undervalue each other , 
the want of sympathy will sufficiently account 
for their false judgments. Suppose Newton, 
Quinault, and Machiavel, accidentally meeting 
together, unknown to each other, would they 
not soon have desisted from the vain attempt of 
communicating their ideas ? The philosopher 
had condemned the poet of the Graces as an in- 
tolerable trifler, and the author of the " The 
Prince" as a dark political spy. Machiavel had 
conceived Newton to be a dreamer among the 
stars, and a mere almanack-maker among men ; 
and the other a rhimer, nauseously doucereux. 
Quinault might have imagined he was seated 
between two madmen. Having annoyed each 
i>2 



174 



WANT OF MUTUAL ESTEEM 



other for some time, they would have relieved 
their ennui by reciprocal contempt, and each 
have parted with a determination to avoid here- 
after two disagreeable companions.* 



* See Helvetius, De l'Esprit* 




( 175) 



CHAPTER XL 



SELF-PRAISE. 



Vanity, egotism, a strong sense of their own 
sufficiency, form another accusation against men 
of genius ; but the complexion of self-praise 
must alter with the occasion ; for the simplicity 
of truth may appear vanity, and the conscious- 
ness of superiority seem envy — to Mediocrity. 
It is we who do nothing, who cannot even 
imagine any thing to be done, who are so much 
displeased with self-lauding, self-love, self-inde- 
pendence, self-admiration, which with the man 
of genius are nothing but a modification of the 
passion of glory. 

He who exults in himself is at least in earnest ; 
but he who refuses to receive that praise in 
public for which he has devoted so much labour 
in his privacy, is not : he is compelled to sup- 
press the very instinct of his nature ; for while 
we censure no man for loving fame, but only 



176 SELF-PRAISE. 

for showing us how much he is possessed by the 
passion, we allow him to create the appetite, 
but we deny him the aliment. Our effeminate 
minds are the willing dupes of what is called the 
modesty of genius, or, as it has been termed, 
" the polished reserve of modern times ;" and this 
from the selfish principle that it serves at least 
to keep out of the company its painful pre-emi- 
nence. But this " polished reserve," like some- 
thing as fashionable, the ladies' rouge, at first 
appearing with rather too much colour, will 
in the heat of an evening, be dying away, till 
the true complexion comes out. We know well 
the numerous subterfuges of these modest men 
of genius, to extort that praise from their pri- 
vate circle which is thus openly denied them. 
Have they not been taken by surprise, en- 
larging their own panegyric, which might rival 
Pliny's on Trajan, for care and copiousness? 
or impudently veiling their naked beauty with 
the transparency of a third person? or never 
prefixing their name to the volume, which 
they would not easily forgive a friend to pass 
unnoticed. 






The love of praise is instinctive in the nature 
of men of genius. Their praise is the foot on 
which the past rests, and the wheel on which the 



SELF-PRAISE. 177 

future rolls. The generous qualities and the 
virtues of a man of genius are really produced 
by the applause conferred on him. To him 
whom the world admires, the happiness of the 
world must be dear, said Madame De Stael. 
Like the North American Indian, (for the savage 
and the man of genius preserve the genuine feel- 
ings of Nature,) he would listen to his own 
name, when amidst his circle they chaunt their 
gods and their heroes. The honest savages laud 
the worthies among themselves, as well as their 
departed; and when an auditor hears his own 
name, he answers by a cry of pleasure and of 
pride. But pleasure and pride in his own name 
must raise no emotion in the breast of genius, 
amidst a polished circle : to bring himself down 
to them, he must start at a compliment, and turn 
away even from one of his own votaries. 

But this, it seems, is not always the case with 
men of genius, since the accusation we are no- 
ticing has been so often reiterated. Take from 
some that supreme opinion of themselves, that 
pride of exultation, and you crush the germ of 
their excellence. Many vast designs must have 
perished in the conception, had not their authors 
breathed this vital air of self-delight, this energy 
©f vanity, so operative in great undertakings* 



178 SELF-PRAISE. 

We have recently seen this principle in the litera- 
ry character unfold itself in the life of the late 
Bishop of Landaff: whatever he did, he felt it 
was done as a master ; whatever he wrote, it was 
as he once declared, the best work on the subject 
yet w T ritten. It was this feeling with which he 
emulated Cicero in retirement or in action. 
" When I am dead, you will not soon meet with 
another John Hunter," said the great anatomist, 
to one of his garrulous friends. An apology is 
formed for relating the fact, but the weakness is 
only in the apology. Corneille has given a very 
noble full-length of the sublime egotism which 
accompanied him through life :* and I doubt if 
we had any such author in the present day, whe- 
ther he would dare to be so just to himself, and 
so hardy to the public. The self-praise of Buffon 
at least equalled his genius ; and the inscription 
beneath his statue in the library of the Jardin 
des Plantes, which I was told was raised to him 
in his life time, exceeds all panegyric ; — it places 
him alone in Nature, as the first and the last inter- 
preter of her works. He said of the great geniuses 
of modern times, that there were not more than 
five,—" Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, 
and Myself." It was in this spirit that he con- 

* Sec. it versified in Curiosities of Literature, vol. ii. 



SELF-PRAISE. I79 

ceived and terminated his great works, that he 
sat in patient meditation at his desk for half a 
century, and that all Europe, even in a state of 
war, bowed to the modern Pliny. 

Nor is the vanity of Buffon, and Voltaire, and 
Rousseau so purely national as some will suppose ; 
for men of genius in all ages have expressed a 
consciousness of the internal force of genius. 
No one felt this self-exultation more potent than 
our Hobbes, who has indeed, in his controversy 
with Wallis, asserted that there may be nothing 
more just than self-commendation ;* and De 
Thou, one of the most noble-minded, the most 
thinking, the most impartial of historians, in the 
Memoirs of his own life, composed in the third 
person, has surprised and somewhat puzzled 
the critics, by that frequent distribution of self- 
commendation which they knew not how to 
accord with the modesty and gravity with 
which he was so amply endowed. After his 
great and solemn labour, amidst the injustice 
of his persecutors, that great man had sufficient 
experience of his own merits to assert them. 
Kepler, amidst his great discoveries, looks down 
like a superior being on other men. Thus he 

- - See Quarrels of Authors 3 vol. in. p. 113, 



ISO SELF-PRAISE. 

breaks forth in glory and egotism : " I dare insult 
mankind by confessing that I am he who has 
turned science to advantage. If I am par- 
doned, I shall rejoice ; if blamed, I shall endure 
it. The die is cast ; I have written this book, 
and whether it be read by posterity or by my 
contemporaries, is of no consequence ; it may 
well wait for a reader during one century, when 
God himself during six thousand years has 
waited for an observer like myself." He predicts 
that " his discoveries would be verified in suc- 
ceeding ages," yet were Kepler now among us in 
familiar society, we should be invited to inspect 
a monster of inordinate vanity. But it was this 
solitary majesty, this lofty conception of their ge- 
nius, which hovered over the sleepless pillow, v nA 
charmed the solitude, of Bacon, of Newton, ; 
of Montesquieu ; of Ben Jonson, of Milt 
and Corneille ; and of Michael Angelo. Si 
men of genius anticipate their contemporar 
and know they are creators, long before the 
dy consent of the Public ; 

" They see the laurel which entwines their bust, 
They mark the pomp which consecrates their dust, 
Shake oft" the dimness which obscures them now, 
And feel the future glory bind their brow." 

Smedley's Prescience. 



SELF-PRAISE. 181 

To be admired, is the noble simplicity of the 
Ancients in expressing with ardour the conscious- 
ness of genius, and openly claiming that praise 
by which it was nourished. The ancients were 
not infected by our spurious effeminate modesty, 
Socrates, on the day of his trial, firmly commend- 
ed himself : he told the various benefits he had 
conferred on his country. — " Instead of con- 
demning me for imaginary crimes, you would do 
better, considering my poverty, to order me to be 
maintained out of the public treasury." Epicu- 
rus writing to a minister of state, declares — " If 
you desire glory, nothing can bestow it more than 
the letters I write to you :" and Seneca, in quot- 
ing these words, adds — " What Epicurus promis- 
ed to his friend, that, my Lucilius, I promise 
you." Orna me ! was the constant cry of Cicero 5 
and he desires the historian Lucceius to write 
separately the conspiracy of Catiline, and pub- 
lish quickly, that while he yet lived he might 
taste of the sweetness of his glory. Horace and 
Ovid were equally sensible to their immortality : 
but what modern poet would be tolerated with 
such an avowal ? Yet Dryden honestly declares 
that it was better for him to own this failing of 
vanity, than the world to do it for him ; and adds 
" For what other reason have I spent my life in 
so unprofitable a study I Why am I grown old in 



lg£ SELF-PRAISE. 

seeking so barren a reward as fame ? The same 
parts and application which have made me a 
poet, might have raised me to any honours 
of the gown." Was not Cervantes very sensible 
to his own merits, when a rival started up ; and 
did he not assert them too, when passing sentence 
on the bad books of the times, he distinguishes 
his own work by a handsome compliment ? Nor 
was Butler less proud of his own merits ; for he 
has done ample justice to his Hudibras, and trac- 
ed out, with great self-delight, its variety of ex- 
cellencies. Richardson, the novelist, exhibits 
one of the most striking instances of what is call- 
ed literary vanity — the delight of an author in his 
works ; he has pointed out all the beauties of his 
three great works, in various manners.* He al- 
ways taxed a visitor by one of his long letters. 
It was this intense self- delight, which produced 
his voluminous labours. 

There are certain authors whose very existence 
seems to require a high conception of their own 
talents ; and who must, as some animals appear 
to do, furnish the means of life out of their own 
substance. These men of genius open their ca- 
reer with peculiar tastes, or, with a predilection ft 

* I have observed them in Curiosities of Literature, vol. ii 






SELF-PRAISE. 133 

some great work ; in a word, with many unpopu- 
lar dispositions. Yet we see them magnanimous, 
though defeated, proceeding with the public feel- 
ing against them. At length we view them rank> 
ing with their rivals. Without having yielded up 
their peculiar tastes or their incorrigible vitious- 
i) ess, they have however, heightened their indi- 
vidual excellencies. No human opinion can 
change their self opinion ; alive to the conscious- 
ness of their powers, their pursuits are placed 
above impediment, and their great views can 
suffer no contraction. These men of genius bear 
a charmed mail on their breast ; " hopeless, not 
heartless," may be often the motto of their en- 
sign ;. and if they do not always possess reputa- 
tion, they still look for fame ; for these do not 
necessarily accompany each other. 

Acknowledge, too, that an author must be more 
sensible to his real merits, while be is unques- 
tionably much less to his defects, than most 
of his readers > the author not only comprehends 
his merits better, because they have passed 
through a long process in his mind, but he is 
familiar with every part, while the reader has had 
but a vague notion of the whole. Why does 
the excellent work, by repetition, rise in interest ? 
because in obtaining this gradual intimacy with 



184 SELF-PRAISE. 

an author, we appear to recover half the genius 
we had lost on a first perusal. The work of 
genius too is associated, in the mind of the au- 
thor, with much more than it contains. Why 
are great men often found greater than the 
books they write? Ask the man of genius, if he 
has written all he wished he could have written ? 
Has he satisfied himself, in this work for which 
you accuse his pride ? The true supplement has 
not always accompanied the work itself. The 
mind of the reader has the limits of a mere re- 
cipient, while that of the author, even after his 
work, is teeming with creation. " On many 
occasions, my soul seems to know more than 
it can say, and to be endowed with a mind by 
itself, far superior to the mind I really have," 
said Marivaux, with equal truth and happiness. 

With these explanations of what are called 
the vanity and egotism of genius, be it remember- 
ed, that the sense of their own sufficiency is as- 
sumed at their own risk; the great man who 
thinks greatly of himself, is not diminishing 
that greatness, in heaping fuel on his fire. With 
his unlucky brethren, such a feeling may end in 
the abarrations of harmless madness; as it hap- 
pened with Percival Stockdale. He, who after 
a parallel between himself and Charles XII. 



SELF-PRAISE. 185 

of Sweden, concludes that " some parts will 
be to his advantage, and some to mine" but in 
regard to fame, — the main object between Stock- 
dale and Charles XII. — Percival imagined that 
" his own will not probably take its fixed and 
immoveable station, and shine with its expanded 
and permanent splendour till it consecrates his 
ashes, till it illumines his tomb." After this, 
the reader, who may never have heard of the 
name of Percival Stockdale, must be told, that 
there exist his own " Memoirs of his Life and 
Writings."* The memoirs of a scribbler are in- 
structive to literary men ; to correct, and to be 
corrected, should be their daily practice, that 
they may be taught not only to exult in them- 
selves, but to fear themselves. 

Jt is hard to refuse these men of genius that 
aura vitalis, of which they are so apt to be liber- 
al to others. Are they not accused of the mean- 
est adulations ? When a young writer finds the 
notice of a person of some eminence, he has 
expressed himself in language which transcended 
that of mortality ; a finer reason than reason 
itself, inspired it; the sensation has been ex- 
pressed with all its fulness, by Milton, 

* I have sketched a character of Percival Stockdale, in 
Calamities of Authors, ii, 313, it was taken ad! vivum, 



186 SELF-PRAISE. 

" The debt immense of endless gratitude." 

Who ever pays an " immense debt," in small 
sums? Every man of genius has left such ho- 
nourable traces of his private affections, — from 
Locke, whose dedication of his great work is 
more adulative than could be imagined, from 
a temperate philosopher, to Churchill, whose 
warm eulogiums on his friends so beautifully 
contrast with the dark and evil passions of his 
satire. Even in advanced age, the man of genius 
dwells on the nutritious praise he caught in his 
youth from veteran genius ; that seed sinks 
deep into a genial soil, roots there, and, like 
the aloe, will flower at the end of life. When 
Virgil was yet a youth, Cicero heard one of his 
eclogues, and exclaimed with his accustomed 
warmth, 

Magna spes altera Romae I 

u The second great hope of Rome " intending 
by the first, either himself or Lucretius. The 
words of Cicero were the secret honey on which 
the imagination of Virgil fed for many a year ; 
for in one of his latest productions, the twelfth 
book of the JEneid, he applies these very words 



SELF-PRAISE. jg^ 

to Ascanius ; the voice of Cicero had hung for 
ever in his ear. 



■ 



Such then, is the extreme susceptibility of 
praise in men of genius, and not less their exuber- 
ant sensibility to censure ; J have elsewhere 
shown how some have died of criticism. The 
Abbe Cassagne felt so acutely the severity of 
Boileau, that in the prime of life he fell me- 
lancholy, and died insane. I am informed that 
the poet, Scott of Amwell, could never recover 
from a ludicrous criticism, written by a physician, 
who never pretended to poetical taste. Some, 
like Racine, have died of a simple rebuke, and 
some have found an epigram, as one who fell a 
victim to one, said, " fasten on their hearts, and 
have been thrown into a slow fever." Pope has 
been seen writhing in anguish on his chair ; and 
it is told of Montesquieu, that notwithstanding 
the greatness of his character, he was so much 
affected by the perpetual criticisms on his work 
on Laws, that they hastened his death. The 
morbid feelings of Hawkesworth closed in suicide. 
The self-love of genius is, perhaps, much more 
delicate than gross. 

But alas, their vengeance as quickly kindled^ 
lasts as long ! Genius is a dangerous gift of na- 



188 SELF-PRAISE. 

lure ; with a keener relish for enjoyment, and 
with passions more effervescent, the same materi- 
al forms a Catiline and a Cromwell, or a 'Cicero 
and a Bacon. Plato, in his visionary man of 
genius, lays great stress on his possessing the most 
vehement passions, while he adds reason to res^ 
train them. But it is imagination which tor- 
ments even their inflammable senses ; give to the 
same vehement passion a different direction, and 
it is glory, or infamy. 

Si je n'etois Caesar, j'aurois ete Brutus." 

Voltaire^ 

The imagination of genius is the breath of its 
life, which breeds its own disease. How are we to 
describe symptoms which come from one source, 
but show themselves in all forms ? It is now an 
intermittent fever, now a silent delirium, an hys- 
terical affection, and now a horrid hypochondri- 
asm. Have we no other opiate to still the agony, 
no other cordial to send its warmth to the heart, 
than Plato's reason ? Must men of genius, who 
so rarely pass through this slow curative method, 
remain with all their tortured and torturing pas- 
sions about them, often self-disgusted, self-humil- 
iated 1 The enmities of genius are often connect- 
ed with their morbid imagination j these origin^ 






SELF-PRAISE. ^39 



ate in casual slights, or in unguarded expressions, 
or in hasty opinions, or in a witty derision, or even 
in the obtruding goodness of tender admonition — 
The man of genius broods over the phantom that 
darkens his feelings, and sharpens his vindictive 
fangs, in a libel, called his memoirs, or in another 
public way, called a criticism. We are told, that 
Comines the historian, when residing at the court 
of the Count de Charolois afterwards Duke of 
Burgundy, one day returning from hunting, with 
inconsiderate jocularity sat down before the 
Count, ordering the Prince to pull off.his boots ; 
the Count would not affect greatness, and having 
executed his commission, in return for the prince- 
ly amusement, the Count dashed the boot on 
Comines's nose, which bled ; and from that time, 
he was mortified at the Count of Burgundy, by 
retaining the nick-name of the booted head. The 
blow rankled in the heart of the man of genius, 
and the Duke of Burgundy has come down to us 
in his memoirs, blackened by his vengeance. 
Many, unknown to their readers, like Comines, 
have had a booted head, but the secret poison is 
distilled on their lasting page. I have elsewhere 
fully written a tale of literary hatred, where is 
seen a man of genius, devoting a whole life in 
harassing the industry or the genius which he 
himself could not attain, in the character of Gil- 



130 SELF-PRAISE. 

bert Stuart.* The French Revolution, among its 
illustrations of the worst human passions exhibits 
one, in Collot d'Herbois ; when this wretch was 
tossed up in the storm, to the summit of power, a 
monstrous imagination seized him ; he projected 
rasing the city of Lyons and massacring its inha- 
bitants. He had even the heart to commence, 
and to continue this conspiracy against human 
nature ; the ostensible motive was royalism, but 
the secret one was literary vengeance ! as wretch- 
ed a poet and actor as a man, he had been hissed 
off the theatre in Lyons, and his dark remorseless 
genius resolved to repay that ignominy, by the 
blood of its citizens and the very walls of the 
city. Is there but one Collot d'Herbois in the 
universe ? When the imagination of genius be- 
comes its madness, even the worst of human b< 
ings is only a genus. 

* See Calamities of Authors, ii. 49. 



( 191 ) 




CHAPTER X1L 



DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS, 



When the temper and the leisure of the literary 
character are alike broken, even his best works, 
the too faithful mirrors of his state of mind, will 
participate of its inequalities ; and surely the in- 
cubations of genius in its delicate and shadowy 
combinations, are not less sensible in their opera- 
tion than the composition of sonorous bodies, 
where, while the warm metal is settling in the 
mould, even an unusual vibration of the air, 
during the moment of fusion, will injure th,e 
ttme. 

Some of the conspicuous blemishes of several 
great compositions may be attributed to the do- 
mestic infelicities of their authors. The desulto- 
ry life of Camoens is imagined to be perceptible 
in the deficient connection of his epic ; and Mil- 
ton's peculiar situation and divided family prevent- 



192 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

ed those passages from being erased, which 
otherwise had not escaped from his revising 
hand — he felt himself in the situation of his 
Sampson Agonistes, whom he so pathetically 
describes, as 

" His foes derision, captive, poor and blind." 

Cervantes, through precipitate publication, fell 
into those slips of memory observable in his satir- 
ical romance. The careless rapid lines of Dry- 
den are justly attributed to his distress, and he 
indeed pleads for his inequalities from his domes- 
tic circumstances. Johnson silently, but eagerly, 
often corrected the Ramblers in their successive 
editions, of which so many had been despatched 
in haste. The learned Greaves offered some ex- 
cuses for his errors in his edition of Abulfeda, 
from " his being five years encumbered with law- 
suits and diverted from his studies." When at 
length he returned, to them, he expresses ^us 
surprise C: at the pains he had formerly under- 
gone," but of which he now felt himself " un- 
willing, he knew not how, of again undergoing." 
Goldoni, when at the bar, abandoned his comic 
talent for several years ; and having resumed it, 
his first comedy totally failed : " My head," says 
lie, i( was occupied with my professional em- 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 193 

ployment, I was uneasy in mind and in bad hu- 



The best years of Mengs's life were em- 
bittered by the misery and the harshness of his 
father, who himself a poor artist, and with 
poorer feelings, converted his home into a 
prison-house, forced his son into the slavery of 
stipulated task-work, while his bread and water 
were the only fruits of the fine arts; in this 
domestic persecution, from which he was at 
length obliged to fly, he contracted those morose 
and saturnine habits, which for ever after shut 
up the ungenial Mengs in the dark solitude of 
his soul. It has been said of Alonso €ano, a 
celebrated Spanish painter, that he would have 
carried his art much higher had not the un- 
ceasing persecution of the inquisitors entirely 
deprived him of that tranquillity so necessary 
to the very existence of art. The poet Rous- 
seau passed half his life in trouble, in anger, and 
in despair, from the severe persecution, or the 
justice, of his enemies, respecting an anonymous 
libel attributed to him ; his temper was poisoned, 
and he poisoned. Ovid, in exile on the barren 
shores of Tomos, deserted by his genius, even in 
his copious Tristia, loses the luxuriance of his 
fancy. The reason which Rousseau alleges for 
the cynical spleen which so frequently breathes 



]94 TtiE DOxMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS, 

forth in his works, shows how the domestic char- 
acter of the man of genius leaves itself behind 
in his productions. After describing the infelici- 
ty of his domestic affairs occasioned by the 
mother of Theresa, and Theresa herself, both 
women of the lowest order, he adds on this 
wretched marriage, " these unexpected dis- 
agreeable events, in a state of my own choice } 
plunged me into literature, to give a new direc- 
tion and diversion to my mind ; and in all my 
first works, I scattered that bilious humour 
which had occasioned this very occupation." 
Our author's character in his works was the 
very opposite one in which he appeared to these 
low people ; they treated his simplicity as utter 
silliness ; feeling his degradation among them, 
his personal timidity assumed a tone of bold- 
ness and originality in his writings, while a 
strong sense of shame heightened his causticity, 
contemning that urbanity he knew not to prac- 
tise. His miserable subservience to these people 
was the real cause of his oppressed spirit calling 
out for some undefined freedom in society. 
Thus the real Rousseau, with all his disordered 
feelings, only appeared in his writings ; the 
secrets of his heart were in his pen. 

The home of the literary character should be 
the abode of repose and of silence. There must 






THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 195 



lie look for the feasts of study, in progressive and 
alternate labours ; a taste " which," says Gibbon, 
" I would not exchange for the treasures of India." 
Rousseau had always a work going on, for 
rainy days and spare hours, such as his dictionary 
of music ; a variety of works never tired ; the 
single one only exhausted. Metastasio talks with 
delight of his variety, which resembled the fruits 
in the garden of Armida, 

E mentre spunta l'un, l'altro mature. 

While one matures, the other buds and blows. 

Nor is it always fame, nor any lower motive, 
which may induce him to hold an indefatigable 
pen ; another equally powerful exists, which 
must remain inexplicable to him who knows not 
to escape from the listlessness of life — the passion 
for literary occupation. He whose eye can only 
measure the space occupied by the voluminous 
labours of the elder Pliny, of a Mazzuchelli, a 
Muratori, a Montfaucon, and a Gough, all men 
who laboured from the love of labour, and can see 
nothing in that space but the industry which filled 
it, is like him who only views a city at a distance 
— the streets and the squares, and all the life and 
population within, he can never know. These 
literary characters projected these works as so 
many schemes to escape from uninteresting pur- 
suits ; and, in these folios? how many evils of life 



196 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

did they bury, while their happiness expanded 
with their volume. Aulus Gellius desired to live 
no longer, than he was able to retain the faculty 
fcf writing and observing. The literary character 
must grow as impassioned* with his subject as iElian 
with his History of Animals ; " wealth and hon- 
our I might have obtained at the courts of 
princes ; but I preferred the delight of multi- 
plying my knowledge. I am aware that the ava- 
ricious and the ambitious will accuse me of folly, 
but I have always found most pleasure in observ- 
ing the nature of animals, studying their charac- 
ter, and writing their history." Even with those 
who have acquired their celebrity, the love of 
literary labour is not diminished, a circumstance 
recorded by the younger Pliny of Livy ; in a 
preface to one of his lost books, that historian 
had said that he had got sufficient glory by his 
former writings on the Roman history, and might 
now repose in silence ; but his mind was so rest- 
less and so abhorrent of indolence, that it only 
felt its existence in literary exertion. Such are 
the minds who are without hope, if they are 
without occupation. 

Amidst the repose and silence of study, de- 
lightful to the literary character, are the soothing 
interruptions of the voices of those whom he 
loves ; these shall re-animate his languor, and 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. jg? 

moments of inspiration shall be caught in the 
emotions of affection, when a father or a friend, 
a wife, a daughter, or a sister, become the par- 
ticipators of his own tastes, the companions of 
his studies, and identify their happiness with his 
Jame. If Horace was dear to his friends, he de-- 
clares they owed him to his father, 






purus et insons 

(Ut me collaudem) si vivo et carus amicis, 

Causa fuit Pater his. 

Lib. i. Sat. v 

If pure and innocent, if dear (forgive 
These little praises) to my friends I live, 
My father was the cause. 



Francis. 



This intelligent father, an obscure tax-gather- 
er, discovered the propensity of Horace's mind ; 
for he removed the boy of genius from a rural 
seclusion to the metropolis, anxiously attending 
on him to his various masters. Vitruvius pours 
forth a grateful prayer to the memory of his pa- 
rents, who had instilled into his soul a love for 
literary and philosophical subjects. The father 
of Gibbon urged him to literary distinction, and 
the dedication of tbe " Essay on literature," to 
that father, connected with his subsequent labour, 
shows the force of the excitement. The son of 
Buibn one day surprised his father by the sight 
e2 



|98 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

of a column, which he had raised to the memory 
of his father's eloquent genius. " It will do you 
honour," observed the Gallic sage. And when 
that son in the revolution was led to the guillo- 
tine, he ascended in silence, so impressed with his 
father's fame, that he only told the people, " I am 
the son of BufTon !" It w T as the mother of Burns 
who kindled his genius by delighting his child- 
hood with the recitations of the old Scottish bal- 
lads, while to his father he attributed his cast of cha- 
racter ; as Bishop Watson has recently traced to 
the affectionate influence of his mother, the reli- 
gious feelings which he declares he had inherited 
from her. There is, what may be called, family 
genius ; in the home of a man of genius he dif- 
fuses an electrical atmosphere ; his own pre-em- 
inence strikes out talents in all. Evelyn, in his 
beautiful retreat at Sayes Court, had inspired his 
family with that variety of tastes which he him- 
self was spreading throughout the nation. His 
son translated Rapin's " Gardens," which poem 
the father proudly preserved in his " Sylva ;" his 
lady, ever busied in his study, excelled in the arts 
her husband loved, and designed the frontispiece 
to his Lucretius ; she was thtf cultivator of their 
celebrated garden, which served as " an exam- 
ple," of his great work on " forest trees." Cow- 
ley, who has commemorated Evelyn's love of 
books and gardens, has delightfully applied them 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 199 

to his lady, in whom, says the bard, Evelyn meets 
both pleasures ; 

11 The fairest garden in her looks, 
And in her mind the wisest books." 

The house of Haller resembled a temple conse- 
crated to science and the arts, for the votaries 
were his own family. The universal acquire- 
ments of Haller, were possessed in some degree 
by every one under his roof; and their studious 
delight in transcribing manuscripts, in consulting 
authors, in botanising, drawing and colouring the 
plants under his eye, formed occupations which 
made the daughters happy and the sons eminent. 
The painter Stella inspired his family to copy 
his fanciful inventions, and the playful graver of 
Claudine Stella, his niece, animated his " Sports 
of Children.'' The poems of the late Hurdis 
were printed by the hands of his sisters. 

"No event in literary history is more impressive 
than the fate of Quintillian ; it was in the midst 
of his elaborate work, composed to form the lite- 
rary character of a son, his great hope, that he 
experienced the most terrible affliction in the 
domestic life of genius — the deaths of his wife, 
and one child after the other. It was a moral 
earthquake with a single survivor amidst the 
ruins. An awful burst of parental and literary 



200 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

affliction breaks forth in Quintillian's lamentation^ 
— " my wealth, and my writings, the fruits of a 
long and painful life, must now be reserved only 
for strangers ; all I possess is for aliens and no 
longer mine !" The husband, the father, and the 
man of genius, utter one cry of agony. 

Deprived of these social consolations, we see 
Johnson call about him those whose calamities 
exiled them from society, and his roof lodges the 
blind, the lame and the poor ; for the heart of 
genius must possess something human it can call 
its own to be kind to. Its elevated emotions, 
even in domestic life, would enlarge the moral 
vocabulary, like the Abbe de Saint Pierre, who 
has fixed in his language two significant words ; 
one which served to explain the virtue most fa- 
miliar to him — bienfaisance ; and the irritable 
vanity magnifying its ephemeral fame th e sage 
reduced to a mortifying diminutive — la gloriole. 

It has often excited surprise that men of 
genius eminent in the world, are not more rever- 
enced than other men in their domestic circle. 
The disparity between the public and the pri- 
vate esteem of the same man is often striking ; 
in privacy the comic genius is not always cheer- 
ful, the sage is sometimes ridiculous, and the poet 
not delightful. The golden hour of invention 






THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENfUS. 201 

must terminate like other hours, and when the 
man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the 
vexations, and the amusements of life, his com- 
panions behold him as one of themselves — the 
creature of habits and infirmities. Men of 
genius, like the deities of Homer, are deities 
only in their " Heaven of Invention :" mixing 
with mortals, they shed their blood like Venus, 
or bellow like Mars. Yet in the business of life 
the cultivators of science and the arts, with all 
their simplicity of feeling and generous openness 
about them, do not meet on equal terms with 
other men ; their frequent abstractions calling 
off the mind to whatever enters into its favourite 
pursuits, render them greatly inferior to others 
in practical and immediate observation. A man 
of genius may know the whole map of the world 
of human nature ; but, like the great geographer, 
may be apt to be lost in the wood, which any 
one in the neighbourhood knows better than him. 
" The conversation of a poet," says Goldsmith, 
" is that of a man of sense, while his actions are 
those of a fool." Genius, careless of the future, 
and absent in the present, avoids to mix too 
deeply in common life as its business ; hence it 
becomes an easy victim to common fools and vul- 
gar villains. " [ love my family's welfare, but I 
can-jot be so foolish as to make myself the slave 
to the minute affairs of a house," said Montes- 



202 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

quieu. The story told of a man of learning is 
probably true, however ridiculous ; deeply occu- 
pied in his library, one, rushing in, informed him 
that the house was on fire ! " Go to my wife — 
these matters belong to her!" pettishly replied 
the interrupted student. Bacon sat at one end 
of his table wrapt in many a reverie, while at 
the other the creatures about him were trafficking 
with his honour, and ruining his good name ; " I 
am better fitted for this," said that great man 
©nee, holding out a book, (i than for the life I 
have of late led." Buffon, who consumed his 
mornings in his old tower of Montbar, at the end 
of his garden, with all nature opening to him, 
formed all his ideas of what was passing before 
him by the arts of an active and pliant capuchin, 
and the comments of a perruquier on the scanda- 
lous chronicles : these he treated as children ; 
but the children commanded the great man. 
Dr. Young, whose satires give the very anatomy 
of human foibles, was entirely governed by his 
housekeeper ; she thought and acted for him, 
which probably greatly assisted the " Night 
Thoughts," but his curate exposed the do- 
mestic economy of a man of genius by a satiri- 
cal novel. Was not the hero Marlborough, at the 
moment he was the terror of France and the 
glory of Germany, held under the finger of h^ 
wife by the meanest passion of avarice ? 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OP GENIUS. 203 

But men of genius have too often been ac- 
cused of imaginary crimes ; their very eminence 
attracts the lie of calumny, a lie which tradition 
conveys beyond the possibility of refutation. 
Sometimes reproached for being undutiful sons, 
because they displeased their fa thers in making 
an obscure name celebrated. The family of Des- 
cartes were insensible to the lustre his studies 
reflected on them; they lamented, as a blot in 
their escutcheon, that Descartes, who was born 
a gentleman, should become a philosopher. This 
elevated genius was even denied the satisfaction 
of embracing an unforgiving parent, while his 
dwarfish brother, with a mind diminutive as his 
person, ridiculed his philosophic relative, and 
turned to advantage his philosophic dispositions. 
They have been deemed disagreeable compa- 
nions, because they felt the weariness of dull- 
ness, or the impertinence of intrusion ; as bad 
husbands, when united to women, who without 
a kindred feeling had the mean sense, or the 
unnatural cruelty, to prey upon their infirmities. 
But is the magnet less a magnet, though the 
particles scattered about it, incapable of attrac- 
tion, are unagitated by its occult quality ? 

Poverty is the endemial distemper of the 
commonwealth j but poverty is no term for 
fi ears polite." Few can conceive a great eha- 






204 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

racter in a state of humble existence ! r 
passion for wealth through all ranks, leaving 
Hollanders aside, seems peculiar to the con 
where the " Wealth of Nations" is made the 
principle of its existence ; and where the 
4>ono9 is ever referred to a commercial re 
This is not the chief object of life among 
continental nations, where it seems properly 
stricted to the commercial class. Montesqi 
who was in England, observed that " if he 
been born here nothing could have consoled 
on failing to accumulate a large fortune, b 
do not lament the mediocrity of my circumstan- 
ces in France." This evil, for such it may be 
considered, has much increased here since Mon- 
tesquieu's visit. It is useless to persuade some 
that there is a poverty, neither vulgar nor terri- 
fying, asking no favours, and on no terms receiv- 
ing any — a poverty which annihilates its ideal 
evils, and becomes even a source of pride — a 
state which will confer independence, that fyst 
step to genius ! 



There have been men of genius who have even 
learnt to want. We see Rousseau rushing out 
of the hotel of the financier, selling his watch, 
copying music by the sheet, and by the mechan- 
ical industry of two hours, purchasing ten for ge- 
nius. We may smile at the enthusiasm of young 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 205 

Barry, who finding himself too constant a haunter 
of tavern-company, imagined that this expendi- 
ture of time was occasioned by having money ; 
to put an end to the conflict, he threw the little 
he possessed at once into the Liffey ; but let us 
not forget that Barry, in the maturity of life, con- 
fidently began a labour of years, and one of the 
noblest inventions in his art, a great poem in a 
picture, with no other resource than what he 
found in secret labours through the night, by 
which he furnished the shops with those slight 
and saleable sketches which secured uninterrupt- 
ed mornings for his genius. Spinosa, a name 
as celebrated and calumniated as Epicurus, lived 
in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of 
pensions, and of presents, which, however dis- 
guised by kindness, he would not accept, so 
fearful was this philosopher of a chain ; lodg- 
ing in a cottage, and, obtaining a livelihood by 
polishing optical glasses, at his death his small 
accounts showed how he had subsisted on a few 
pence a day. 

" Enjoy spare feast! a radish and an egg. v — Cowper. 

Spinosa said he never had spent more than he 
earned, and certainly thought there was such a 
thing as superfluous earnings. Such are the 
men who have often smiled at the light regard of 
their neighbours in contrast with their growing 
s 



206 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

celebrity ; and who feel that eternal truth, which 
the wisest and the poorest of the Athenians has 
sent down to us, that " not to want any thing is 
an attribute of the Divinity ; but man approxi- 
mates to this perfection by wanting little." 

There may be sufficient motives to induce 
the literary character to make a state of medi- 
ocrity his choice. If he loses his happiness, he 
mutilates his genius. Goldoni, with the sim- 
plicity of his feelings and habits, in reviewing 
his life, tells us how he was always relapsing 
into his old propensity of comic writing ; " but 
the thought of this does not disturb me; for 
though in any other situation I might have been 
in easier circumstances, I should never have 
been so happy." Bayle is a parent of the 
modern literary character; he pursued the same 
course, and early in life adopted the principle 
" Neither to fear bad fortune, nor have any 
ardent desires for good." He was acquainted 
with the passions only as their historian, and 
living only for literature, he sacrificed to it the 
two great acquisitions of human pursuits — for- 
tune and a family ; but in England, in France, 
in Germany, in Italy, in Holland, in Flanders, 
at Geneva, he found a family of friends, and 
an accumulation of celebrity. A life of hard 
deprivations was long the life of Linnaeus, 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS, 207 

Without a fortune, it never seemed to him 
necessary to acquire one. Peregrinating on foot 
with a stylus, a magnifying glass, and a basket 
for plants, he shared with the peasant his rustic 
meal. Never was glory acquired at a cheaper 
rate, says one of his eulogists. Satisfied with 
the least of the little, he only felt the necessity 
of completing his Floras ; and the want of for- 
tune did not deprive him of his glory, nor of 
that statue raised to him after death in the 
gardens of the University of Upsal ; nor of that 
solemn eulogy delivered by a crowned head ; 
nor of those medals which the king of Sweden, 
and the Swedes, struck, to commemorate the 
genius of the three kingdoms of Nature. 

In substituting fortune for the object of his 
designs, the man of genius deprives himself of 
the inspirations of him who lives for himself; 
that is, for his Art. If he bends to the public 
taste, not daring to raise it to his own, he has 
not the choice of his subjects, which itself is a 
sort of invention. A task-worker ceases to think 
his own thoughts ; the stipulated price and time 
are weighing on his pen or his pencil, while the 
hour-glass is dropping its hasty sands. If the 
man of genius would become something more 
than himself — if he would be wealthy and even 
luxurious, another fever torments him, besides 



£08 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

the thirst of glory ; such ardent desires create 
many fears, and a mind in fear is a mind in 
slavery. So inadequate, too, are the remunera- 
tions of literary works, that the one of the 
greatest skill and difficulty, and the longest 
labour, is not valued with that hasty spurious 
novelty for which the taste of the public is 
craving, from the strength of its disease rather 
than its appetite. Rousseau observed that his 
musical opera, the work of five or six weeks, 
brought him as much money as he had received 
for his Emilius, which had cost him twenty 
years of meditation, and three years of compo- 
sition. This single fact represents a hundred. 
In one of Shakespeare's sonnets he pathetically 
laments this compulsion of his necessities which 
forced him on the trade of pleasing the public } 
and he illustrates this degradation by a novel 
image. " Chide Fortune," cries the bard, — 

" The guilty goddess of my harmless deeds, 
That did not better for my life provide 
Than public means which public manners breeds; 
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand ; 
And almost thence my nature is subdued 
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 

Such is the fate of that author, who, in his 
variety of task-works, blue, yellow, and red, 
lives without ever having shown his own natu- 
ral complexion. We hear the eloquent truth 



THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 209 

Jrom another who has shared in the bliss of 
composition, and the misery of its " daily bread." 
" A single hour of composition won from the 
business of the day, is worth more than the 
whole day's toil of him who works at the trade 
of literature : in the one case the spirit comes 
joyfully to refresh itself, like a hart to the 
water-brooks ; in the other it pursues its miser- 
able way, panting and jaded with the dogs of 
hunger and necessity behind."* 

Genius undegraded and unexhausted, may, 
indeed, even in a garret, glow in its career; 
but it must be on the principle which induced 
Rousseau solemnly to renounce writing " par 
metier." This in the Journal des Scavans he 
once attempted, but found himself quite inade- 
quate to " the profession,"f In a garret, the 
author of the " Studies of Nature" exultingly 
tells us that he arranged his work. " It was in 
a little garret, in the new street of St. Etienne 
du Mont, where I resided four years, in the 
midst of physical and domestic afflictions. But 
there I enjoyed the most exquisite pleasures of 
my life, amid profound solitude and an enchant- 
ing horizon. There I put the finishing hand 

* Quarterly Review, No. XVI. p. 53S 

t Twice he repeated this resolution. — See his works, vol 
sxxi. p. 283 ', vol. xxxii. p. 90. 

$2 



210 THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 

to my " Studies of Nature," and there I publish- 
ed them." 



It has been a question with some, more indeed 
abroad than at home, whether the art of instruct- 
ing mankind by the press would not be less sus- 
picious in its character, were it less interested in 
one of its motives ? We have had some noble 
self-denials of this kind, and are not without 
them even in our country. Boileau almost cen- 
sures Racine for having accepted money for one 
of his dramas, while he who was not rich, gave 
away his elaborate works to the public ; and he 
seems desirous of raising the art of writing to a 
more disinterested profession than any other, 
requiring no fees. Milton did not compose his 
immortal labour with any view of copyright ; 
and Linnaeus sold his works for a single ducat. 
The Abbe Mably, the author of many political 
and moral works, preserved the dignity of the 
literary character, for while he lived on little, he 
would accept only a few presentation copies 
from the booksellers. Since we have become a 
nation of book collectors, the principle seems 
changed ; even the wealthy author becomes 
proud of the largest tribute paid to his genius, 
because this tribute is the evidence of the num- 
bers who pay it; so that the property of a book 
represents to the literary candidate so many thou- 
sand voters in his favour. 






THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF GENIUS. 211 

The man of genius wrestling with heavy and 
oppressive fortune, who follows the avocations 
of an author as a precarious source of existence, 
should take as the model of the authorial life 
that of Dr. Johnson ; the dignity of the literary 
character was ever associated with his feelings ; 
and the " reverence thyself" was present to his 
mind even when doomed to be one of the He- 
lotce of literature, by Osborn, by Cave, or by 
Millar. Destitute of this ennobling principle, the 
author sinks into the tribe of those rabid adven- 
turers of the pen who have masked the degrad- 
ed form of the literary character under the title 
of " authors by profession" — the Guthries, the 
Ralphs, and the Amhursts.* " There are worse 
evils, for the literary man," says a modern author, 
who is himself the true model of the great lite* 
rary character, — " than neglect, poverty, impri- 
sonment, and death. There are even more piti- 
able objects than Chatterton himself with the 
poison at his lips." " I should die with hunger, 
were I at peace with the world," exclaimed a 
corsair of literature, — and dashed his pen into 
that black flood before him of soot and gall. 

* The Reader will find an original letter by Guthrie to a 
Minister of State } in which this modern phrase was probably 
his own invention, with the principle unblushingly avowed. 
See " Calamities of authors," vol. i. p. 5. Ralph farther 
opens mysteries, in an anonymous pamphlet of " The Case 
ef Authors by Profession." Th«y were both pensioned. 



( 212 ) 

CHAPTER XIII. 
THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

Matrimony has often been considered as & 
condition not well suited to the domestic life of 
genius ; it is accompanied by too many embar- 
rassments for the head and the heart. It was an 
aixom with Fuessli, the Swiss artist, that the 
marriage state is incompatible with a high cul- 
tivation of the fine arts. Peiresc, the great 
French collector, refused marriage, convinced 
that the cares of a family were too absorbing 
for the freedom necessary to literary pursuits, 
and a sacrifice of fortune incompatible with his 
great designs. Boyle, who would not suffer his 
studies to be interrupted by " household affairs," 
lived as a boarder with his sister. Lady Kanelagh. 
Bayle, and Hobbes, and Hume, and Gibbon, 
and Adam Smith, decided for celibacy. Such 
has been the state of the great author whose 
sole occupation is combined with passion, and 
whose happiness is his fame — fame, which balan- 
ces that of the heroes of the age, who have 
sometimes honoured themselves by acknowledg- 
ing it. 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 21$ 

This debate, for our present topic has some- 
times warmed into one, in truth is ill adapted 
for controversy ; the heart is more concerned in 
its issue than any espoused doctrine terminating 
in partial views. Look into the domestic annals 
of genius — observe the variety of positions into 
which the literary character is thrown in the 
nuptial state. Will cynicism always obtain his 
sullen triumph, and prudence be allowed to cal- 
culate away some of the richer feelings of our 
nature ? Is it an axiom that literary characters 
must necessarily institute a new order of celi- 
bacy ? One position we may assume, that the 
studies, and even the happiness of the pursuits 
of literary characters, are powerfully influenced 
by the domestic associate of their lives. 

Men of genius rarely pass through the age of 
love without its passion : even their Delias and 
Amandas are often the shadows of some real 
object. According to Shakespeare's experience, 

*i Never durst poet touch a pen to write, 

• Until his ink were tempered with love's sighs." 
Love's Labour Lost, Act IV. Scene 3. 

Their imagination is perpetually colouring those 
pictures of domestic happiness they delight to 
dwell on. He who is no husband may sigh 
for that devoted tenderness which is at once 
bestowed and received ; and tears may start in 



2U THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 



J S 



the eyes of him who can become a child anion 
children, and is no father. These deprivations 
have usually been the concealed cause of the 
querulous and settled melancholy of the literary 
character. The real occasion of Shenstone's 
unhappiness was, that early in life he had been 
captivated by a young lady adapted to be both 
the muse and the wife of the poet. Her mild 
graces were soon touched by his plaintive love- 
songs and elegies. Their sensibility was too 
mutual, and lasted for some years, till she died. 
It was in parting from her that he first sketched 
his " Pastoral Ballad." Shenstone had the for- 
titude to refuse marriage ; his spirit could not 
endure that she should participate in that life of 
deprivations to which he was doomed, by an in- 
considerate union with poetry and poverty. But 
he loved, and his heart was not locked up in the 
ice of celibacy. He says in a moment of hu- 
mour, " It is long since I have considered myself 
as undone. The world will not perhaps consider 
me in that light entirely till I have married my 
maid." Thomson met a reciprocal passion in 
his Amanda, while the full tenderness of his heart 
was ever wasting itself, like waters in a desert. 
As we have been made little acquainted with this 
part of the history of the poet of the Seasons, I 
give his own description of these deep feelings 
from a manuscript letter written to Mallet. " To 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 215 

turn my eyes a softer way, to you know who—* 
absence sighs it to me. — What is my heart made 
of ? a soft system of low nerves, too sensible for 
my quiet — capable of being very happy or very 
unhappy, I am afraid the ast will prevail. Lay 
your hand upon a kindred heart, and despise me 
not. I know not what it is, but she dwells upon 
my thought in a mingled sentiment, which is the 
sweetest, the most intimately pleasing the soul 
can receive, and which I would wish never to 
want towards some dear object or another. To 
have always some secret darling idea to which 
one can still have recourse amidst the noise and 
nonsense of the world, and which never fails to 
touch us in the most exquisite manner, is an art 
of happiness that fortune cannot deprive us of. 
This may be called romantic ; but whatever the 
cause is, the effect is really felt. Pray, when 
you write, tell me when you saw her, and with 
the pure eye of a friend, when you see her again, 
whisper that I am her most humble servant." 
Even Pope was enamoured of " a scornful lady ;" 
and, as Johnson observed, " polluted his will with 
female resentment." Johnson himself, we are 
told by Miss Seward, who knew him, " had al- 
ways a metaphysical passion for one princess or 
other, — the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty 
Molly Aston, or the sublimated methodistic Hill 
Boothby ; and, lastly, the more charming Mr^ 






£16 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

Thrale." Even in his advanced age, at the 
height of his celebrity, we hear his cries of lone- 
ly wretchedness. " I want every comfort ; my 
life is very solitary and very cheerless. Let me 
know that I have yet a friend — let us be kind to 
one another." ( But the " kindness", of distant 
friends is like the polar sun, too far removed to 
warm. A female is the only friend the solitary 
can have, because her friendship is never absent. 
Even those who have eluded individual tender- 
ness, are tortured by an aching void in their 
feelings. The stoic Akenside, in his books of 
" Odes," has preserved the history of a life of 
genius in a series of his own feelings. One en- 
titled, " At Study," closes with these memorable 
fines : 

lc Me though no peculiar fair 
Touches with a lover's care ; 

Though the pride of my desire 
Asks immortal friendship's name, 
Asks the palm of honest fame 

And the old heroic lyre ; 
Though the day have smoothly gone, 
Or to lettered leisure known, 

Or in social duty spent ; 
Yet at eve my lonely breast 
Seeks in vain for perfect rest. 

Languishes for true content." 

If ever a man of letters lived in a state of 
energy and excitement which might raise him 
above the atmosphere of social love, it was as- 






THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 



217 



suredly the enthusiast, Thomas Mollis, who, sole- 
ly devoted to literature and to republicanism, 
was occupied in furnishing Europe and America 
with editions of his favourite authors. He would 
not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the la- 
bours of his platonic politics. But his extraor- 
dinary memoirs, while they show an intrepid 
mind in a robust frame, bear witness to the self- 
tormentor who had trodden down the natural 
bonds of domestic life. Hence the deep " de- 
jection of his spirits ;" those incessant cries, that 
he has " no one to advise, assist, or cherish those 
magnanimous pursuits in him." At length he re- 
treated into the country, in utter hopelessness. 
" I go not into the country for attentions to agri- 
culture as such, nor attentions of interest of any 
kind, which I have ever despised as such ; but as a 
used man, to pass the remainder of a life in tole- 
rable sanity and quiet, after having given up the 
flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, month, year 
after year, successive to each other, to public ser- 
vice, and being no longer able to sustain, in body or 
mind, the labours that I have chosen to go through 
without falling speedily into the greatest disorders, 
and it might be imbecility itself. This is not 
colouring, but the exact plain truth," and Gray's, 

" Poor moralist, and what art tbou ? 
A solitary fiy ! 

T 



218 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

Thy joys no glittering female meets, 
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets.'* 

Assuredly it would not be a question whether 
these literary characters should have married, 
had not Montaigne, when a widower, declared 
that " he woukl not marry a second time, though 
it were wisdom itself ;" — but the airy Gascon has 
not disclosed how far Madame was concerned in 
this anathema. 

If the literary man unites himself to a woman 
whose tastes, and whose temper, are adverse to 
his pursuits, he must courageously prepare for a 
martyrdom. Should a female mathematician be 
united to a poet, it is probable that she would be 
left to her abstractions ; to demonstrate to her- 
self how many a specious diagram fails when 
brought into its mechanical operation ; or while 
discovering the infinite varieties of a curve, may 
deduce her husband's. If she becomes as jea- 
lous of his books as other wives are of the mis- 
tresses of their husbands, she may act the virago 
even over his innocent papers. The wife of 
Bishop Cooper, while her husband was employed 
on his Lexicon, one day consigned the volume 
of many years to the flames ; and obliged that 
scholar to begin a second siege of Troy in a se- 
cond Lexicon. The wife of Whitelocke often 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. £19 

destroyed his MSS. and the marks of her nails 
have come down to posterity in the numerous 
lacerations still gaping in his " Memorials." 
The learned Sir Henry Saville, who devoted 
more than half his life, and near ten thousand 
pounds, to his magnificent edition of St. Chry- 
sostom, led a very uneasy life between that 
Saint and Lady Saville ; what with her tender- 
ness for him and her own want of amusement, 
Saint Chrysostom incurred more than one dan- 
ger. One of those learned scholars who trans- 
lated the Scriptures, kept a diary of his studies 
and his domestic calamities, for they both went 
on together ; busied only among his books, his 
wife, from many causes, plunged him into debt ; 
he was compelled to make the last sacrifice of a 
literary man, by disposing of his library. But 
now, he without books, and she worse s and worse 
in temper, discontents were of fast growth be- 
tween them. Our man of study, found his 
wife, like the remora, a little fish, sticking at 
the bottom of his ship impeding its progress. 
He desperately resolved to fly from his country 
and bis wife. There is a cool entry in the diary, 
on a warm proceeding, one morning; wherein 
he expresses some curiosity to know the cause 
of his wife being out of temper ! Simplicity of 
a patient scholar!* The present matrimonial 

* The entry may amuse. Hodie, nescio qua intemperia 
uxorem meara agitavit, nam pecuniam usudatam projecit hurai, 



220 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

case, however, terminated in unexpected happi- 
ness; the wife, after having forced her husband 
to be deprived of his library, to be daily chro- 
nicling her caprices, and finally, to take the 
serious resolution of abandoning his country, 
yet, living in good old times, religion and con- 
science united them again; and, as the connu- 
bial diarist ingeniously describes this second 
marriage of himself and his wife, — " made it be 
with them, as surgeons say it is with a fractured 
bone, if once well set, the stronger for a frac- 
ture." A new consolation for domestic rup- 
tures ! 

Observe the errors and infirmities of the great- 
est men of genius in their matrimonial connec- 
tions. Milton carried nothing of the greatness of 
his mind, in the choice of his wives ; his first wife 
was the object of sudden fancy. He left the 
metropolis, and unexpectedly returned a married 
man ; united to a woman of such uncongenial 
dispositions, that the romp was frightened at the 
literary habits of the great poet, found his house 
solitary, beat his nephews, and ran away after a 
single month's residence ! to this circumstance, 
we owe his famous treatise on Divorce, and a 

ac sic irata discessit." — " This day, I know not the cause of 
the ill-temper of my wife; when I gave her money for daily 
expences, she flung it upon the ground and departed in pas- 
sion." For some, this Flemish picture must be too familiar ta 
please, too minute a copy of vulgar life. 



Ifl€ MATRIMONIAL STATE. 221 

party, (by no means extinct,) who, having made 
as ill choices in their wives, were for divorsing, as 
fast as they had been for marrying, calling them- 
selves Miltonists. When we find that Moliere, so 
skilful in human life, married a girl from his 
own troop, who made him experience all those 
bitter disgusts and ridiculous embarrassments 
which he himself played off at the Theatre ; 
that Addison's fine aste in morals and in life, 
could suffer the ambition of a courtier to prevail 
with himself to seek a Countess, whom he des- 
cribes under the stormy character of Oceana, 
who drove him contemptuously into solitude, and 
shortened his days ; and, that Steele, warm and 
thoughtless, was united to a cold precise " Miss 
Prue," as he calls her, and from whom he never 
parted without bickerings ; in all these cases, we 
censure the great men, not their wives.^ Rous- 
seau has honestly confessed his error : he had 
united himself to a low illiterate woman — and 
when he retreated into solitude, he felt the weight 
which he carried with him. He laments that he 
had not educated his wife ; " In a docile age, 1 1 
could ijave adorned her mind with talents and 
knowledge winch would have more closely united 
us in ret\rement. We should not then have felt 
the intolerable taedium of a tete a tete ; it is in 

* See Curiosities of Literature, vol. ii. for various aner ;! - . 
of" Literary Wives." Sixth Edition, 1817. 

t2 



222 THE MATRIMOMAL STATE 

solitude one feels the advantage of living with 
another who can think." Thus Rousseau con- 
fesses the fatal error, and indicates the right prin- 
ciple. 

But it seems not absolutely necessary for the 
domestic happiness of the literary character, that 
his wife should be a literary woman. The lady 
of Wieland was a very pleasing domestic person, 
who without reading her husband's works, knew 
he was a great poet. Wieland was apt to exer- 
cise his imagination in a sort of angry declama- 
tion and bitter amplifications ; and the writer of 
this account, in perfect German taste, assures us, 
" that many of his felicities of diction were thus 
struck out at a heat :" during this frequent ope- 
ration of his genius, the placable temper of Mrs. 
Wieland overcame the orgasm of the German 
bard, merely by her admiration and her patience. 
When the burst was over, Wieland himself was 
so charmed by her docility, that he usually 
closed with giving up all his opinions. There 
is another sort of homely happiness, aptly des- 
cribed in the plain words of Bishop Newton : 
He found " the study of sacred and classic au- 
thors ill agreed with butchers' and bakers' bills ;" 
and when the prospect of a bishopric opened 
on him, " more servants, more entertainments, 
a. better table, &c." it became necessary to look 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 223 

out for " some clever sensible woman to be his 
wife, who would lay out his money to the best 
advantage, and be careful and tender of his 
health ; a friend and companion at all hours, and 
who would be happier in staying at home than 
be perpetually gadding abroad." Such are the 
wives, not adapted to be the votaries, but who 
may be the faithful companions through life, 
even of a man of genius. 

That susceptibility, which is love in its most 
compliant forms, is a constitutional faculty in 
the female character, and hence its docility and 
enthusiasm has varied with the genius of differ- 
ent ages. When universities were opened to 
the sex, have they not acquired academic glory ? 
Have not the wives of military men shared in 
the perils of the field, and as Anna Comnena, 
and our Mrs. Hutchinson, become even their 
historians ? In the age of love and sympathy 
the female receives an indelible character from 
her literary associate ; his pursuits are even the 
objects of her thoughts ; he sees his tastes reflect- 
ed in his family, much less by himself, whose soli- 
tary labours often preclude him from forming 
them, than by that image of his own genius in 
his house — the mother of his children. Anti- 
quity abounds with many inspiring examples of 
this gameleon reflection of the female character. 



224 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

Aspasia, from the arms of Pericles, borrowing his 
genius, could instruct the archons how to govern 
the republic ; Portia, the wife of the republican 
Brutus, devouring the burning coals, showed a 
glorious suicide which Brutus had approved ; 
while Paulina, the wife of Seneca, when the 
veins of that philosopher were commanded to 
be opened, voluntarily chose the same death ; 
the philosopher commanded that her flowing 
blood should be stopped, but her pallid features 
ever after showed her still the wife of Seneca ! 
The wife of Lucan is said to have transcribed 
and corrected the Pharsalia after the death of 
her husband ; the tender mind of the wife had 
caught the energy of the bard by its intercourse ; 
and when he was no more, she placed his bust 
on her bed, that she might never close her eyes 
without being soothed by his image. The pic- 
ture of a literary wife of antiquity has descended 
to us, touched by the domestic pencil of a man 
of genius. It is the susceptible Calphurnia, the 
lady of the younger Pliny ; " her affection to me 
has given her a turn to books — her passion will 
increase with our days, for it is not my youth or 
my person, which time gradually impairs, but my 
reputation and my glory, of which she is en- 
amoured." Could Mrs. Hutchinson have written 
the life of her husband, had she not reflected 
from the patriot himself, all his devotedness to 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. ^23 

the country, had she not lent her whole soul to 
every event which concerned him ? This female 
susceptibility was strong in the wife of Klop- 
stock ; our novelist Richardson, who could not 
read the Messiah in the original, was desirous of 
some account of the poem, and its progress. 
She writes to him that no one can inform him 
better than herself, for she knows the most of 
that which is not published, " being always pre- 
sent at the birth of the young verses, which be- 
gin by fragments here and there, of a subject of 
which his soul is just then filled. Persons who 
live as we do have no need of two cham- 
bers ; we are always in the same ; I with my little 
work, still, still, — only regarding sometimes my 
husband's sweet face, which is so venerable at 
that time, with tears of devotion and all the sub- 
limity of the subject — my husband reading me 
his young verses and suffering my criticisms." 
Meta Mollers writes with enthusiasm, and in 
German English ; but he is a pitiful critic who 
has only discovered the oddness of her language. 

Gesner declared that whatever were his ta- 
lents, the person who had most contributed to 
develope them was his wife. She is unknown 
to the public ; but the history of the mind of such 
a woman can only be truly discovered in the 
" Letters of Gesner and his Family." While 
Gesner gave himself up entirely to his favour- 



226 ™E MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

ite arts, drawing, painting, etching, and com- 
posing poems, his wife would often reanimate a 
genius that was apt to despond in its attempts, 
and often exciting him to new productions, her 
certain and delicate taste was attentively con- 
sulted by the poet-painter — but she combined 
the most practical good sense with the most 
feeling imagination; this forms the rareness of 
the character — for this same woman, who united 
with her husband in the education of their 
children, to relieve him from the interruptions of 
common business, carried on alone the concerns 
of his house in la librairie. Her correspondence 
Aith her son, a young artist travelling for his 
studies, opens what an old poet comprehensively 
terms " a gathered mind." Imagine a woman 
attending the domestic economy, and the com- 
mercial details, yet withdrawing out of this busi- 
ness of life into that of the more elevated pur- 
suits of her husband, and the cares and counsels 
she bestowed on her son to form the artist and 
the man. To know this incomparable woman 
we must hear her. " Consider your father's 
precepts as oracles of wisdom ; they are the re- 
sult of the experience he has collected, not only 
of life, but of that art which he has acquired sim- 
ply by his own industry." She would not have 
her son suffer his strong affection to herself to 
absorb all other sentiments. " Had you remain- 
ed at home, and been habituated under your 






t 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 227 

mother's auspices to employments merely do- 
mestic, what advantage would you have ac- 
quired ? I own we should have passed some de- 
lightful winter evenings together ; but your love 
for the arts, and my ambition to see my sons as 
much distinguished for their talents as their vir- 
tues, would have been a constant source of regret 
at your passing your time in a manner so little 
worthy of you." How profound is her observa- 
tion on the strong but confined attachments of a 
youth of genius. " I have frequently remarked, 
with some regret, the excessive attachment you in- 
dulge towards those who see and feel as you do 
yourself, and the total neglect with which you seem 
to treat every one else. I should reproach a man 
with such a fault who was destined to pass his life 
in a small and unvarying circle ; but in an artist, 

. who has a great object in view, and whose coun- 
try is the whole world, this disposition seems to 
me likely to produce a great number of inconve- 

: niences — alas ! my son, the life you have hither- 
to 1 ed in your father's house has been in fact a 

! pastoral life, and not such a one as was necessary 
for the education of a man whose destiny sum- 
mons him to the world." — And when her son, 
after meditating on "some of the most glorious 
productions of art, felt himself, as he says, 
" disheartened and cast down at the unattainable 
superiority of the artist, and that it was only by 



228 THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 

reflecting on the immense labour and continued 
efforts which such master pieces must have 
required, that I regained my courage and my 
ardour," she observes, " this passage, my dear 
son, is to me as precious as gold, and I send it to 
you again, because I wish you to impress it 
strongly on your mind. The remembrance of 
this may also be a useful preservative from too 
great confidence in your abilities, to which a warm 
imagination may sometimes be liable, or from 
the despondence you might occasionally feel from 
the contemplation of grand originals. Continue, 
therefore, my dear son, to form a sound judgment 
and a pure taste from your own observations ; 
your mind, while yet young and flexible, may 
receive whatever impressions you wish. Be 
careful that your abilities do not inspire in you 
too much confidence, lest it should happen to you 
as it has to many others, that they have never 
possessed any greater merit than that of having 
good abilities." One more extract to preserve 
an incident which may touch the heart of genius. 
This extraordinary woman, whose characteristic 
is that of strong sense with delicacy of feeling, 
would check her German sentimentality at the 
moment she was betraying those emotions in 
which the imagination h so powerfully mixed up 
with the associated feelings. Arriving at their 
cottage at Sihlwald, she proceeds — " On enter- 



THE MATRIMONIAL STATE. 229 

ing the parlour three small pictures, painted 
by you, met my eyes. I passed some time in 
contemplating them. It is now a year, thought I, 
since I saw him trace these pleasing forms ; he 
whistled and sang, and 1 saw them grow under 
his pencil ; now he is far, far from us. — In 
short, I had the weakness to press my lips on one 
of these pictures. You well know, my dear son, 
that 1 am not much addicted to scenes of a sen- 
timental turn; but to-day, while I considered 
your works, I could not restrain from this little 
impulse of maternal feelings. Do not, however, 
be apprehensive that the tender affection of a 
mother will ever lead me too far, or that I shall 
suffer my mind to be too powerfully impressed 
with the painful sensations to which your absence 
gives birth. My reason convinces me that it is 
for your welfare that you are now in a place where 
your abilities will have opportunities of unfolding, 
and where you can become great in your art." 

Such was the incomparable wife and mother 
of the Gesners! — Will it now be a question 
whether matrimony is incompatible with the 
cultivation of the arts? A wife who reanimates 
the drooping genius of her husband, and a mo- 
ther who is inspired by the ambition of seeing 
her sons eminent, is she not the real being which 
the ancients only personified in their Muse ? 

IT 



( 230 ) 

CHAPTER XIV. 
LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 

Among the virtue* which literature inspires, is 
that of the most romantic friendship. The deli- 
rium of love, and even its lighter caprices, are 
incompatible with the pursuits of the student ; 
but to feel friendship like a passion, is necessary 
to the mind of genius, alternately elated and 
depressed, ever prodigal of feeling, and excursive 
in knowledge. 

The qualities which constitute literary friend- 
ship, compared with those of men of the world, 
must render it as rare as true love itself, which it 
resembles in that intellectual tenderness of which 
both so deeply participate. Two atoms must 
meet out of the mass of nature, of such parity, 
that when they once adhere, they shall be as one, 
resisting the utmost force of separation. Thi 
literary friendship begins " in the dews of thei 
youth," and may be said not to expire on thei 
tomb. Engaged in similar studies, if one is foun- 
to excel, he shall find in the other the protecto 
of his fame. In their familiar conversation: 



LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 231 

the memory of the one associates with the fancy 
of the other ; and to such an intercourse, the 
world owes some of the finer effusions of genius, 
and some of those monuments of labour which 
required more than one giant hand. 

In the poem Cowley composed on the death 
of his friend Harvey, this stanza opens a pleasing 
scene of two young literary friends engaged in 
their midnight studies. 

" Say, for you saw us, ye immortal lights 
How oft unwearied have we spent the nights, 
Till the Ladsean stars, so famed for love, 
Wondered at us from above. 
We spent them not in toys, in lust, or wine ; 

But search of deep philosophy, 

Wit, eloquence, and poetry ; 
Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine." 

Milton has not only given the exquisite Lyci- 
das to the memory of one young friend, but his 
Epitaphium Damonis to another. 

Now, mournfully cries the youthful genius, 
as versified by Langhorne, 

" To whom shall I my hopes and fears impart, 
Or trust the cares and follies of my heart ?" 

The sonnet of Gray on West, is another beau- 
tiful instance of that literary friendship of which 
we have several instances in our own days, from 



432 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 

the school or the college ; and which have ri- 
valled in devoted affections any which these pages 
can record. 



Such a friendship can never be the lot of men 
of the world, for it takes its source in the most 
elevated feelings ; it springs up only in the fresh- 
ness of nature, and is gathered in the golden age 
of human life. It is intellectual, and it loves 
solitude ; for literary friendship has no convivial 
gaieties and factious assemblies. The friend- 
ships of the men of society move on the princi- 
ple of personal interest, or to relieve themselves 
from the listlessness of existence ; but interest 
can easily separate the interested, and as weari- 
ness is contagious, the contact of the propagator 
is watched. Men of the world may look on 
each other with the same countenances, but not 
with the same hearts. Literary friendship is a 
sympathy, not of manners, but of feelings. In 
the common mart of life may be found intima- 
cies which terminate in complaint and contempt ; 
the more they know one another, the less is their 
mutual esteem ; the feeble mind quarrels with 
one still more imbecil than himself; the dissolute 
not with the dissolute, and while they despise 
their companions, they too have become despi- 
cable. 



LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. £3$ 

That perfect unity of feeling, that making of 
two individuals but one being, is displayed in 
such memorable friendships as those of Beaumont 
and Fletcher ; whose labours were so combined 
that no critic can detect the mingled production 
of either ; and whose lives were so closely united, 
that no biographer can compose the memoirs 
of the one without running into the life of the 
other. Their days were as closely intervoven as 
their verses. Montaigne and Charron, in the eyes 
of posterity, are rivals, but such literary friendship 
knows no rivalry; such was Montaigne's affec- 
tion for Charron, that he requested him by his 
will to bear the arms of the Montaignes ; and 
Charron evinced his gratitude to the manes of 
his departed friend, by leaving his fortune to the 
sister of Montaigne. How pathetically Erasmus 
mourns over the death of his beloved Sir Thomas 
More — " In Moro mihi videor extinctus"-—" I 
seem to see myself extinct in More." — It w 7 as a 
melancholy presage of his own death, which 
shortly after followed. The Doric sweetness and 
simplicity of old Isaac Walton, the angler, were 
reflected in a mind as clear and generous, when 
Charles Cotton continued the feelings, rather 
than the little work of Walton. Metastasio and 
Farinelli called each other il Gemello, the Twin ; 
and both delighted to trace the resemblance 

of their lives and fates, and the perpetual alii" 
u % 



234 LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 

ance of the verse and the voice. Goguet, the 
author of " The Origin of the Arts and Sciences," 
bequeathed his MSS. and his books to his friend 
Fugere, with whom he had long united his affec- 
tions and his studies, that his surviving friend 
might proceed with them ; but the author had 
died of a slow and painful disorder, which Fugere 
had watched by the side of his dying friend, in 
silent despair ; the sight of those MSS. and books 
was his death-stroke ; half his soul which had 
once given them animation was parted from him, 
and a few weeks terminated his own days. When 
Loyd heard of the death of Churchill, he neither 
wished to survive him nor did. The Abbe de St. 
Pierre gave an interesting proof of literary friend- 
ship for Varignon the geometrician; they were 
of congenial dispositions, and St. Pierre, when 
he went to Paris, could not endure to part with 
Varignon, who was too poor to accompany him ; 
and St. Pierre was not rich. A certain income, 
however moderate, was necessary for the tran- 
quil pursuits of geometry. St. Pierre presented 
Varignon with a portion of his small income, 
accompanied by that delicacy of feeling which 
men of genius who know each other can best 
conceive : " I do not give it you." said St. Pierre, 
'■ as a salary but an annuity, that thus you may 
be independent and quit me when you dislike 
me." The same circumstance occurred between 
Akenside and Dyson, who, when the poet was 



LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. 235 

in great danger of adding one more illustrious 
name to the Calamities of Authors, interposed 
between him and ill-fortune, by allowing him 
an annuity of three hundred a-year, and when 
he found the fame of his literary friend attacked, 
although not in the habit of composition, Dyson 
published an able and a curious defence of Aken- 
side's poetical and philosophical character. The 
name and character of Dyson have been suffered 
to die away, without a single tribute of even 
biographical sympathy ; but in the record of 
literary glory, the patron's name should be in- 
scribed by the side of the literary character ; for 
the public incurs an obligation whenever a man 
of genius is protected. 

The statesman Fouquet, deserted by all others, 
witnessed La Fontaine hastening every literary 
man to the prison-gate ; many have inscribed 
their works to their disgraced patron, in the hour 

When Int'rest tails off all her sneaking train, 
And all the obliged desert, and all the vain, 
They wait, or to the scaffold, or the cell, 
"When the last ling'ring friend has bid farewell. 

Such are the friendships of the great literary 
character ! Their elevated minds have raised them 
into domestic heroes, whose deeds have been of- 
ten only recorded on that fading register, the hu- 
man heart. 



( 236 ) 
CHAPTER XV. 

THE LITERARY AND THE PERSONAL CHARACTER, 

Are the personal dispositions of an author dis- 
coverable in his writings as those of an artist are 
imagined to appear in his works, where Michael 
Angelo is always great and Raphael ever graceful ? 

Is the moralist a moral man ? Is he malignant 
who publishes caustic satires ? Is he a libertine 
who composes loose poems? And is he whose 
imagination delights in terror and in blood, the 
very monster he paints ? 

Many licentious writers have led chaste lives. 
La Mothe le Vayer wrote two works of a free 
nature ; yet his was the unblemished life of a re- 
tired sage. Bayle is the too faithful compiler of 
impurities, but he resisted the corruption of the 
senses as much as Newton. La Fontaine wrote 
tales fertile in intrigues, yet the " bon homme" 
has not left on record a single ingenious amour. 
Smollet's character is immaculate ; yet he has 
described two scenes which offend even in the 
freedom of imagination. Cowley, who boasts 
with such gaiety of the versatility of his passion 
among so many mistresses, wanted even the con- 
fidence to address one. Thus, licentious writers 



THE LITERARY, &c. 237 

iuay be very chaste men; for the imagination 
may be a volcano, while the heart is an Alp of ice. 

Turn to the moralist — there we find Seneca, 
the disinterested usurer of seven millions, writing 
on moderate desires, on a table of gold. Sallust, 
who so eloquently declaims against the licentious- 
ness of the age, was repeatedly accused in the Sen- 
ate of public and habitual debaucheries; and when 
this inveigher against the spoilers of provinces 
attained to a remote government, Sallust pillaged 
like Verres. Lucian, when young, declaimed 
against the friendship of the great, as another 
name for servitude ; but when his talents procured 
him a situation under the Emperor, he facetiously 
compared himself to those quacks, who themselves 
plagued with a perpetual cough, offer to sell an 
infallible remedy for one. Sir Thomas More, in 
his Utopia, declares that no man ought to be 
punished for his religion ; yet he became a fierce 
persecutor, racking and burning men when his 
own true faith here was at the ebb. At the mo- 
ment the Poet Rosseau was giving versions of the 
Psalms, full of unction, as our neighbours say, he 
was profaning the same pen with the most infa- 
mous of epigrams. We have heard of an erotic 
poet of our times composing sacred poetry, or 
night-hymns in church-yards. The pathetic ge- 
nius of Sterne played about his head : but never 
reached his heart 



238 TH E LITERARY AND 

And thus with the personal dispositions of an 
author, which may be quite the reverse from those 
which appear in his writings. Johnson would not 
believe that Horace was a happy man, because his 
verses were cheerful, no more than he could think 
Pope so, because he is continually informing us of it. 
5Toung, who is constantly contemning preferment in 
his writings, was all his life pining after it ; and 
while the sombrous author of the "Night Thoughts" 
was composing them, he was as cheerful as any other 
man ; he was as lively in conversation as he was 
gloomy in his writings: and when a lady expressed 
her suprise at his social converse, he replied — 
" There is much difference between writing and 
talking." Moliere, on the contrary, whose hu- 
mour was so perfectly comic, and even ludicrous, 
was a very thoughtful and serious man, and 
perhaps even of a melancholy temper : his strong- 
ly-featured physiognomy exhibits the face of a 
great tragic, rather than of a great comic, poet. 
Could one have imagined that the brilliant wit, 
the luxuriant raillery, and the fine and deep sense 
of Paschal could have combined with the most 
opposite qualities — the hypochondriasm and 
bigotry of an ascetic ? Rochefoucauld, says 
the eloquent Dugald Stewart, in private life was 
a conspicuous example of all those moral qualities 
of which he seemed to deny the existence, and 
exhibited in this respect a striking contrast to th* 



THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 239 

Cardinal De Retz, who has presumed to censure 
him for his want of faith in the reality of virtue ; 
and to which we must add, that De Retz was one 
of those pretended patriots without a single of 
those virtues for which he was the clamorous 
advocate of faction. When Valincour attributed 
the excessive tenderness in the tragedies of Racine 
to the poet's own impassioned character, the 
younger Racine amply showed that his father was 
by no means this slave of love ; that his intercourse 
with a certain actress was occasioned by his pains 
to form her, who with a fine voice, and memory, 
and beauty, was incapable of comprehending the 
verses she recited, or accompanying them with 
any natural gesture. The tender Racine never 
wrote a single love poem, nor had a mistress ; 
and his wife had never read his tragedies, for 
poetry was not her delight. Racine's motive 
for making love the constant source of action in 
his tragedies, was on the principle which has 
influenced so many poets, who usually conform to 
the prevalent taste of the times. In the court 
of a young monarch, it was necessary that heroes 
should be lovers; and since Corneille had so 
~obly run in one career, Racine could not have 
xisted as a great, poet, had be not rivalled him 
t an opposite one. The tender Racine was no 
•ver; but he was a subtle and epigrammatic 
^server, before whom his convivial friends never 



240 THE LITERARY AND 

cared to open their minds. It is not therefore 
surprising if we are often erroneous in the con- 
ception we form of the personal character of a 
distant author. Klopstock, the votary of Zion's 
muse, so astonished and warmed the sage Bodmer, 
that he invited the inspired bard to his house 5 
but his visitor shocked the grave professor, when, 
instead of a poet rapt in silent meditation, a vola- 
tile youth leapt out of the chaise, who was 
an euthusiast for retirement only when writ- 
ing verses. An artist whose pictures exhibit 
a series of scenes of domestic tenderness, awa- 
kening all the charities of private life, participa- 
ted in them in no other way than on his can- 
vass. Evelyn, who has written in favour of 
active life, loved and lived in retirement ; while 
Sir George Mackenzie framed an eulogium on 
solitude, who had been continually in the bustle 
of business. 

Thus an author and an artist may yield no 
certain indication of their personal character in 
their works. Inconstant men will write on con- 
stancy, and licentious minds may elevate them- 
selves into poetry and piety. And were this not 
so, we should be unjust to some of the greatest 
geniuses, when the extraordinary sentiments they 
put into the mouths of their dramatic personages 
are maliciously applied to themselves. Euri- 



THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 241 

pides was accused of atheism, when he made a 
denier of the gods appear on the stage. Milton 
has been censured by Clarke for the impiety of 
Satan ; and it was possible that an enemy of 
Shakespeare might have reproached him for his 
perfect delineation of the accomplished villain 
lago ; as it was said that Dr. Moore was some- 
times hurt in the opinions of some, by his horrid 
Zeluco. Crebillon complains of this. — " They 
charge me with all the iniquities of Atreus, and 
they consider me in some places as a wretch with 
whom it is unfit to associate ; as if all which the 
mind invents must be derived from the heart." 
This poet offers a striking instance of the little 
alliance existing between the literary and person- 
al dispositions of an author. Crebillon, who ex- 
ulted on his entrance into the French academy, 
that he had never tinged his pen with the gall of 
satire, delighted to strike on the most harrowing 
string of the tragic lyre. In his Atreus, the father 
drinks the blood of his son ; in Rhadamistus, the 
son expires under the hand of the father; in 
Electra, the son assassinates the mother. A poet 
is a painter of the soul ; but a great artist^ is not 
therefore a bad man. 

Montaigne appears to have been sensible of 
this fact in the literary character. Of authors, he 
says, he likes to read their little anecdotes and 
w 



^42 THE LITERARY AND 

private passions ; and adds, " Car j'ai unc singu- 
liere curiosite de connoitre l'ame et les naifs juge- 
mens de mes auteurs. II faut bien juger leur 
suffisance, mais non pas leurs moeurs, ni eux, par 
cette montre de leurs ecrits qu'ils etalent au thea- 
tre du monde." Which may be thus translated-— 
" For I have a singular curiosity to know the soul 
and simple opinions of my authors. We must 
judge of their ability, but not of their manners, 
nor of themselves, by that show of their writings 
which they display on the theatre of the world." 
This is very just, and are we yet convinced, that 
the simplicity of this old favourite of Europe, 
might not have been as much a theatrical ges- 
ture, as the sentimentality of Sterne ? 

We must not therefore consider that he who 
paints vice with energy is therefore vicious, lest 
we injure an honourable man ; nor must we 
imagine that he who celebrates virtue is there- 
fore virtuous, for we may then repose on a heart 
which knowing the right pursues the wrong. 

These paradoxical appearances in the history 
of genius present a curious morai phenomenon. 
Much must be attributed to the plastic nature of 
the versatile faculty itself. Men of genius have 
often resisted the indulgence of one talent to ex- 
ercise another with equal power ; some, who have 



THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 



243 



solely composed sermons, could have touched on 
the foibles of society with the spirit of Horace or 
Juvenal ; Blackstone and Sir William Jones di- 
rected that genius to the austere studies of law 
and philology, which might have excelled in the 
poetical and historical character. So versatile 
is this faculty of genius, that its possessors are 
sometimes uncertain of the manner in which they 
shall treat their subject ; whether to be grave or 
ludicrous? When Breboeuf the French translator 
of the Pharsalia of Lucan, had completed the first 
book as it now appears, he at the same time com- 
posed a burlesque version, and sent both to the 
great arbiter of taste in that day, to decide which 
the poet should continue ? The decision proved 
to be difficult. Are there not writers who can 
brew a tempest or fling a sunshine with all the 
vehemence of genius at their will? They adopt 
one principle, and all things shrink into the pig- 
my forms of ridicule ; they change it, and all rise 
to startle us, with animated Colossuses. On this 
principle of the versatility of the faculty, a pro- 
duction of genius is a piece of art which wrought 
up to its full effect is merely the result of certain 
combinations of the mind, with a felicity of man- 
ner obtained by taste and habit. 

Are we then to reduce the works of a man of 
genius to a mere sport of his talents ; a game 



244 THE LITERARY AND 

in which he is only the best player? Can he 
whose secret power raises so many emotions in 
our breasts, be without any in his own ? A mere 
actor performing a part ? Is he unfeeling when 
he is pathetic, indifferent when he is indignant ? 
An alien to all the wisdom and virtue he inspires ? 
No ! were men of genius themselves to assert 
this, and it is said some incline to it, there is a 
more certain conviction, than their mistakes, 
in our own consciousness, which for ever assures 
us, that deep feelings and elevated thoughts must 



s P 



ring from their source. 



In proving that the character of the man may 
be very opposite to that of his writings, we must 
recollect that the habits of life may be contrary 
to the habits of the mind. The influence of their 
studies over men of genius, is limited ; out of 
the ideal world, man is reduced to be the active 
creature of sensation. An author has, in truth, 
two distinct characters ; the literary, formed by 
the habits of his study; the personal, by the 
habits of situation. Gray, cold, effeminate and 
timid in his personal, was lofty and awful in his 
literary character ; we see men of polished man- 
ners and bland affections, in grasping a pen, are 
thrusting a poignard ; while others in domestic 
life, with the simplicity of children and the fee- 
bleness of nervous affections, can shake the senate 






THE PERSONAL CHARACTER. 245 

or the bar with the vehemence of their eloquence 
and the intrepidity of their spirit. 

And, however the personal character may con- 
trast with that of their genius, still are the works 
themselves genuine, and exist in realities for us 
'< — and were so doubtless to themselves, in the 
act of composition. Jn the calm of study, a 
beautiful imagination may convert him whose 
morals are corrupt, into an admirable moralist, 
awakening feelings which yet may be cold in 
the business of life ; since we have shown that 
the phlegmatic can excite himself into wit, and 
the cheerful man delight in Night-thoughts. 
Sallust, the corrupt Sallust, might retain the 
most sublime conceptions of the virtues which 
were to save the Republic ; and Sterne, whose 
heart was not so susceptible in ordinary occur- 
rences, while he was gradually creating incident 
after incident, touching the emotions one after 
another, in the stories of Le Fevre and Maria, 
might have thrilled — like some of his readers.* 

* Long after this was written, and while this volume was 
passing through the press, I discovered a new incident in the 
life of Sterne, which verifies my conjecture. By some un- 
published letters of Sterne's in Mr. Murray's Collection Of 
Autographical Letters, it appears that early in life, he deeply 
fixed the affections of a young lady, during a period of five 
years, and for some cause I know not, he suddenly deserted her, 
and married another. The young lady was too sensible of 
w 2 



246 

Many have mourned over the wisdom or the 
virtue they contemplated, mortified at their own 
infirmities. Thus, though there may be no 
identity between the book and the man, still for 
us, an author is ever an abstract being, and, as 
one of the Fathers said, " a dead man may sin 
dead, leaving books that make others sin." An 
author's wisdom or his folly does not die with 
him. The volume, not the author, is our com- 
panion, and is for us a real personage, performing 
before us whatever it inspires; "he being dead, 
yet speaketh." Such is the vitality of a book ! 

this act of treachery ; she lost her senses and was confined in 
a private mad-house, where Sterne twice visited her. He has 
drawn and coloured the picture of her madness, which he 
himself had occasioned ! This fact only adds to some which 
have so deeply injured the sentimental character of this author, 
and the whole spurious race of his wretched apes. His life 
was loose, and shandean, his principles unsettled, and it does 
not seem that our wit bore a single attraction of personal 
affection about him ; for his death was characteristic of bis 
life. Sterne died at his lodgings, with neither friend nor 
relative by his side ; a hired nurse was the sole companion of 
?he man whose wit found admirers in every street, but whose 
heart could not draw one by his death-bed. 



( 247 ) 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE MAN OF LETTERS. 

Among the more active members of the re- 
public there is a class to whom may be appropri- 
ately assigned the title of Men of Letters. 

The man of letters, whose habits and whose 
whole life so closely resemble those of an author, 
can only be distinguished by the simple circum- 
stance, that the man of letters is not an author. 

Yet he whose sole occupation through life is 
literature, who is always acquiring and never 
producing, appears as ridiculous as the architect 
who never raised an edifice, or the statuary who 
refrains from sculpture. His pursuits are re- 
proached with terminating in an epicurean sel- 
fishness, and amidst his incessant avocations he 
himself is considered as a particular sort of idler. 

This race of literary characters, as they now 
exist, could not have appeared till the press had 
poured its affluence ; in the degree that the na- 
tions of Europe became literary, was that philo- 
sophical curiosity kindled, which induced some 



248 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 

to devote their fortunes and their days, and to 
experience some of the purest of human enjoy- 
ments, in preserving and familiarising them- 
selves with " the monuments of vanished minds," 
that indistructible history of the genius of every 
people, through all its eeras — and whatever men 
have thought and whatever men have done, were 
at length discovered to be found in Books. 

Men of letters occupy an intermediate station 
between authors and readers ; with more curi- 
osity of knowledge and more multiplied tastes, 
and by those precious collections which they 
are forming during their lives, more completely 
furnished with the means than are possessed by 
the multitude who read, and the few who write. 

The studies of an author are usually restricted 
to particular subjects ; his tastes are tinctured by 
their colouring, and his mind is always shaping 
itself to them. An author's works form his soli- 
tary pride, and often mark the boundaries of his 
empire ; while half his life wears away in the 
slow maturity of composition ; and still the am- 
bition of authorship torments its victim alike in 
disappointment or in possession. 

"But the solitude of the man of letters is soothed 
by the surrounding objects of his passion ; he pos- 
sesses them, and they possess him. His volumes 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 249 

in triple rows on their shelves ; his portfolios, 
those moveable galleries of pictures and sketches ; 
his rich medaillier of coins and gems, that library 
without books ; some favourite sculptures and 
paintings, on which his eye lingers as they catch a 
magical light ; and some antiquities of all nations, 
here and there, about his house ; these are his 
furniture ! Every thing about him is so endeared 
to him by habit, and many higher associations, 
that even to quit his collections for a short time 
becomes a real suffering; he is one of the lief- 
hebbers of the Hollanders — a lover or fancier.^ 
He lives where he will die ; often his library and 
his chamber are contiguous, and this " Parva, sed 
apta," this contracted space, has often marked the 
boundary of the existence of the opulent owner. 

His invisible days flow on in this visionary world 
of literature and art ; all the knowledge, and all 
the tastes, which genius has ever created are 
transplanted into his cabinet ; there they flourish 
together in an atmosphere of their own. But 
tranquillity is essential to his existence ; for 
though his occupations are interrupted without 
inconvenience, and resumed without effort, yet 

* The Dutch call every thing for which they have a passion 
lief-hebberge — things having their love ; and as their feeling is 
much stronger than their delicacy, they apply the term to every 
thing, from poesy and picture to tulips and tobacco. Lief- 
hebben are lovers or fanci&rs. 



250 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 

if the realities of life, with all their unquiet 
thoughts, are suffered to enter into his ideal world, 
they will be felt as if something were flung with 
violence anions: the trees where the birds are 
singing, — all would instantly disperse ! 

Such is that life of self-oblivion of the man of 
letters, for which so many have voluntarily relin- 
quished a public station ; or their rank in socie- 
ty ; neglecting even fortune and health. Of 
the pleasures of the man of letters it may be 
said, they combine those opposite sources of en- 
joyment observed in the hunter and the angler. 
Of a great hunter it was said, that he did not 
live but hunted ; and the man of letters, in his 
perpetual researches, feels the like heat, and the 
joy of discovery, in his own chase; while in the 
deep calm of his spirits, such is the sweetness of 
his uninterrupted hours, like those of the angler, 
that one may say of him what Colonel Vena- 
bles, an enthusiastic angler, declared of his fa- 
vourite pursuit, " many have cast off other re- 
creations and embraced this; but I never knew 
any angler wholly cast off, though occasions 
might interrupt, their affections to their beloved 
recreation." 

But " men of the world," as they are so empha- 
tically distinguished, imagine that a man so life- 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 251 

less in u the world" must be one of the dead in it, 
and, with mistaken wit, would inscribe oyer the 
sepulchre of his library, " Here lies the body of 
our friend." If the man of letters has volun- 
tarily quitted their " world," at least he has past 
into another, where he enjoys a sense of ex- 
istence through a long succession of ages, and 
where Time, who destroys all things for others, 
for him only preserves and discovers. This 
world is best described by one who has lingered 
among its inspirations. " We are wafted into 
other times and strange lands, connecting us by 
a sad but exalting relationship with the great 
events and great minds which have passed away. 
Our studies at once cherish and controul the im- 
agination, by leading it over an unbounded range 
of the noblest scenes in the overawing company 
of departed wisdom and genius."* 

If the man of letters is less dependent on 
others for the very perception of his own exist- 
ence, his solitude is not that of a desert, but of 
the most cultivated humanity ; for all there 
tends to keep alive those concentrated feelings 
which cannot be indulged with security, or even 
without ridicule, in general society. Like the 
Lucullus of Plutarch, he would not only live 
among the votaries of literature, but would live 

* Quarterly Review, No. XXXIII. p. 145. 



252 TH E MAN OF LETTERS. 

for them ; he throws open his library, his gal- 
lery, and his cabinet, to all the Grecians. Such 
are the men who father neglected genius, or 
awaken its infancy by the perpetual legacy of 
the " Prizes" of Literature and science ; who 
project those benevolent institutions, where they 
have poured out the philanthropy of their 
hearts in that world which they appear to have 
forsaken. If Europe is literary, to whom does 
she owe this, more than to these men of letters ? 
To their noble passion of amassing through life 
those magnificent collections, which often bear 
the names of their founders from the gratitude 
of a following age ? Venice, Florence, and Co- 
penhagen, Oxford and London, attest the ex- 
istence of their labours. Our Bodleys and our 
Harleys, our Cottons and our Sloanes, our Cra- 
cherodes and our Townleys, were of this race ! 
In the perpetuity of their own studies, they felt 
as if they were extending human longevity, by 
throwing an unbroken light of knowledge into 
the next age. Each of these public works, for 
such they become, was the project and the exe- 
cution of a solitary man of letters during half a 
century ; the generous enthusiasm which inspir- 
ed their intrepid labours ; the difficulties over- 
come ; the voluntary privations of what the world 
calls its pleasures and its honours, would form an 
interesting history not yet written ; their due, yet 
undischarged. 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 253 

living more with books than with men, the 
man of letters is more tolerant of opinions than 
they are among themselves, nor are his views of 
human affairs contracted to the day, as those who 
in the heat and hurry of life can act only on ex- 
pedients, and not on principles; who deem them- 
selves politicians because they are not moralists ; 
to whom the centuries" behind have conveyed no 
results, and who cannot see how the present time 
is always full of the future; as Leibnitz has ex- 
pressed a profound reflection. " Every thing," 
says the lively Burnet, " must be brought to the 
nature of tinder or gunpowder, ready for a spark 
to set it on fire," before they discover it. The 
man of letters is accused of a cold indifference 
tD the interests which divide society. In truth, 
he knows their miserable beginnings and their 
certain terminations ; he is therefore rarely ob- 
served as the head, or the rump, of a party. 

Antiquity presents such a man of letters in 
Atticus, who retreated from a political to a lite- 
rary life ; had his letters accompanied those of 
Cicero they would have illustrated the ideal cha- 
racter of a man of letters. But the sage Atticus 
rejected a popular celebrity for a passion not less 
powerful, yielding up his whole soul to study. 
Cicero, with all his devotion to literature, was 
still agitated by another kind of glory, and the 



204 rHE MAN OF LETTERS.' 

most perfect author in Rome imagined that he 
was enlarging his honours by the intrigues of the 
consulship. He has distinctly marked the cha- 
racter of the man of letters in the person of his 
friend Atticus, and has expressed his respect, 
although he could not content himself with" its 
imitation. " I know," says this man of genius 
and ambition, " I know the greatness and inge- 
nuousness of your soul, nor have I found any 
difference between us, but in a different choice 
of life ; a certain sort of ambition has led me 
earnestly to seek after honours, while other mo- 
tives, by no means blameable, induced you to 
adopt an honourable leisure ; honestum otium."* 
These motives appear in the interesting memoirs 
of this man of letters — a contempt of political 
intrigues with a desire to escape from the bustle 
and splendour of Rome to the learned leisure of 
Athens ; to dismiss a pompous train of slaves for 
the delight of assembling under his roof a lite- 
rary society of readers and transcribers ; and 
there having collected the portraits or busts of 
the illustrious men of his country, he caught 
their spirit, and was influenced by their virtues 
or their genius, as he inscribed under them, in 
concise verses, the characters of their mind. 
Valuing wealth only for its use, a dignified econ- 
omy enabled him to be profuse, and a moderate 
expenditure allowed him to be generous. 

* Ad Atticum, Lib. i. Ep. 17 * 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 255 

The result of this literary life was the strong 
affections of the Athenians; at the first oppor- 
tunity, the absence of the man of letters offered, 
they raised a statue to him, conferring on our 
Pomponius the fond surname of Atticus. To 
have received a name from the voice of the 
city they inhabited, has happened to more than 
one man of letters. Pinelli, born a Neapolitan, 
but residing at Venice, among other peculiar hon- 
ours received from the senate, vivas there distin- 
guished by the affectionate title of" the Venetian." 

Yet such a'character as Atticus could not es- 
cape censure from " men of the world ;" they 
want the heart and the imagination to conceive 
something better than themselves. The happy 
indifference, perhaps the contempt, of our Atticus 
for rival factions, they have stigmatised as a cold 
neutrality, and a timid cowardly hypocrisy. Yet 
Atticus could not have been a mutual friend, had 
both not alike held the man of letters as a sacred 
being amidst their disguised ambition ; and the 
urbanity of Atticus, while it balanced the fierce- 
ness of two heroes, Pompey and Caesar, could 
even temper the rivalry of genius in the orators 
Hortensius and Cicero. A great man of our own 
country widely differed from the accusers of Atti- 
cus ; Sir Matthew Hale lived in times distracted, 
and took the character of our man of letters 
for his model, adopting two principles in 



256 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 

the conduct of Atticus ; engaging with no party 
or public business, and affording a constant 
relief to the unfortunate of whatever party, he 
was thus preserved amidst the^ contests of the 
times. Even Cicero himself, in his happier 
moments, in addressing his friend, exclaims — " I 
had much rather be sitting on your little bench 
under Aristotle's picture, than in the curule 
chairs of our great ones." This wish was pro- 
bably sincere, and reminds us of another great 
politician in his secession from public affairs, 
retreating to a literary life, when he appears 
suddenly to have discovered a new-found world. 
Fox's favourite line, which he often repeated, was, 



H.ow various his employments whom the world 
Calls idle." 

Cowper. 






If the personal interests of the man of letters 
are not too deeply involved in society, his indi- 
vidual prosperity however is never contrary to 
public happiness. Other professions necessa- 
rily exist by the conflict and the calamities of the 
community ; the politician is great by hatching 
an intrigue ; the lawyer in counting his briefs ; 
the physician his sick-list j the soldier is clamo- 
rous for war, and the merchant riots on the 
public calamity of high prices. But the man of 
letters only calls for peace and books, to unite 
himself with his brothers scattered over Europe ; 



THE MAN OF LETTERS, 257 

and his usefulness can only be felt, when, after 
a long interchange of destruction, men during 
short intervals, recovering their senses, discover 
that " knowledge is power." 

Of those eminent men of letters, who were 
not authors, the history of Peiresc opens the 
most enlarged view of their activity. This 
moving picture of a literary life had been lost 
for us, had not Peiresc found in Gassendi a twin- 
spirit ; so intimate was that biographer with the 
very thoughts, so closely united in the same 
pursuits, and so perpetual an observer of the 
remarkable man whom he has immortalized, 
that when employed on this elaborate resem- 
blance of his friend, he was only painting him- 
self with all the identifying strokes of self-love. 

It was in the vast library of Pinelli, the 
founder of the most magnificent one in Europe, 
that Peiresc, then a youth, felt the remote hope 
of emulating the man of letters before his eyes. 
His life was not without preparation, not with- 
out fortunate coincidences, but there was a 
grandeur of design in the execution, which ori- 
ginated in the genius of the man himself. 

The curious genius of Peiresc was marked 
by its precocity, as usually are strong passions 
x 2 



258 THE MAN OF LETTERS. 

in strong minds ; this was the germ of all those 
studies which seemed mature in his youth. He 
resolved on a personal intercourse with the great 
literary characters of Europe ; and his friend 
has thrown over these literary travels, that charm 
of detail by which we accompany Peiresc into 
the libraries of the learned ; there with the his- 
torian opening new sources of history, or with 
the critic correcting manuscripts, and settling 
points of erudition ; or by the opened cabinet of 
the antiquary, decyphering obscure inscriptions, 
and explaining medals; in the galleries of the 
curious in art, among their marbles, their pictures 
and their prints, he has often revealed to the 
artist some secret in his own art. In the museum 
of the- naturalist, or among the plants of the 
botanist, there was no rarity of nature, and no 
work of art on which he had not to communi- 
cate; his mind toiled with that impatience of 
knowledge, that becomes a pain only in the 
cessation of rest. In England Peiresc was the 
associate of Camden and Selden, and had more 
than one interview with that friend to literary 
men, our calumniated James I. ; one may judge 
by these who were the men whom he first sought, 
and by whom he himself ever after was sought. 
Such indeed were immortal friendships ! immortal 
they may be justly called, from the objects in 
which they concerned themselves, and from the 
permanent results of their combined studies. 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 259 

Another peculiar greatness in this literary 
character was his enlarged devotion to literature 
for itself 5 he made his own universal curiosity 
the source of knowledge to other men ; consi- 
dering the studious as forming but one great 
family wherever they were, the national reposi- 
tories of knowledge in Europe, for Peiresc, 
formed but one collection for the world. This 
man of letters had possessed himself of their 
contents, that he might have manuscripts col- 
lated, unedited pieces explored, extracts supplied, 
and even draughtsmen employed in remote parts 
of the world, to furnish views and plans, and to 
copy antiquities for the student, who in some 
distant retirement discovered that the literary 
treasures of the world were unfailingly opened 
to him by the secret devotion of this man of 
letters. 

Carrying on the same grandeur in his views, 
Europe could not limit his inextinguishable 
curiosity; his universal mind busied itself in 
every part of the habitable globe. He kept up 
a noble traffic with all travellers, supplying 
them with philosophical instruments and recent 
inventions, by which he facilitated their dis- 
coveries, and secured their reception even in 
barbarous realms; in return he claimed, at his 
own cost, for he was " born rather to give than 
to receive/ 3 Says Gassendi x fresh importations 



260 *HE MAN OF LETTERS. 

of oriental literature, curious antiquities, or bo- 
tanic rarities, and it was the curiosity of Peiresc 
which first embellished his own garden, and 
thence the gardens of Europe, with a rich 
variety of exotic flowers and fruits. Whenever 
he was presented with a medal, a vase, or a 
manuscript, he never slept over the gift till he 
had discovered what the donor delighted in ; 
and a book, a picture, or a plant, when money 
could not be offered, fed their mutual passion 
and sustained the general cause of science. — 
The correspondence of Peiresc branched out to 
the farthest bounds of Ethiopia, connected both 
Americas, and had touched the newly discovered 
extremities of the universe, when this intrepid 
mind closed in a premature death. 

I have drawn this imperfect view of Peiresc's 
character, that men of letters may be reminded 
of the capacities they possess. There still re- 
mains another peculiar feature. With all these 
vast views the fortune of Peiresc was not great ; 
and when he sometimes endured the reproach 
of those whose sordidness was startled at this 
prodigality of mind, and the great objects which 
were the result, Peiresc replied that " a small 
matter suffices for the natural wants of a literary 
man, whose true wealth consists in the monu- 
ments of arts, the treasures of his library, and 
the brotherly affections of the ingenious." He 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 26 1 

was a French judge, but supported the dignity 
more by his own character than by luxury or 
parade. He would not wear silk, and no tapestry 
hangings 'ornamented his apartments; but the 
walls were covered with the portraits of his 
literary friends : and in the unadorned simpli- 
city of his study, his books, his papers, and 
his letters were scattered about him on the 
tables, the seats, and the floor. There, stealing 
from the world, he would sometimes admit to 
his spare supper his friend Gassendi, " content," 
says that amiable philosopher, " to have me for 
his guest." 

Peiresc,. like Pinelli, never published any work. 
Few days, indeed, passed without Peiresc writing 
a letter on the most curious inquiries ; epistles 
w T hich might be considered as so many little 
books, observes Gassendi.* These men of letters 
derived their pleasure, and perhaps their pride, 

* The history of the letters of Peiresc is remarkable. He 
preserved copies of his entire correspondence ; but it has been 
recorded that many of these epistles were consumed, to save 
fuel, by the obstinate avarice of a niece. This would not have 
been a solitary instance of eminent men leaving their collec- 
tions to unworthy descendants. However, after the silence of 
more than a century, some of these letters have been recovered, 
and may be found in some French journals of A. Millin. They 
descended from the gentleman who married this very niece, 
probably the remains of the collection. The letters answer to 
the description of Gassendi, full of curious knowledge and obser- 
vation . 



262 THE MAN 0F BETTERS. 

from those vast strata of knowledge which their 
curiosity had heaped together in their mighty 
collections. They either were not endowed 
with that faculty of genius which strikes out 
aggregrate views, or with the talent of compo- 
sition which embellishes minute ones. This 
deficiency in the minds of such may be attri- 
buted to a thirst of learning, which the very 
means to allay can only inflame. From all 
sides they are gathering information ; and that 
knowledge seems never perfect to which every 
day brings new acquisitions. With these men, 
ta compose is to hesitate ; and to revise is to be 
mortified by fresh doubts and unsupplied omis- 
sions. Peiresc was employed all his life in a 
history of Provence ; and day after day he was 
adding to the splendid mass. . But " Peiresc," 
observes Gassendi, " could not mature the birth 
of his literary offspring, or lick it into any shape 
of elegant form ; he was therefore content to 
take the midwife's part, by helping the happier 
labours of others." 

Such are the silent cultivators of knowledge, 
who are rarely authors, but who are often, how- 
ever, contributing to the works of authors : 
without their secret labours, the public would 
not have possessed many valued works. That 
curious knowledge of books which, since Europe 
has become literary, is both the beginning and 



THE MAN OF LETTERS. 263 

the result of knowledge ; and literary history 
itself, which is the history of the age, of the 
nation and of the individual, one of the im- 
portant consequences of these vast collections 
of books, has almost been created in our own 
times. These sources, which offer so much de- 
lightful instruction to the author and the artist, 
are separate studies from the cultivation of 
literature and the arts, and constitute . more par- 
ticularly the province of these men of letters. 

The philosophical writer, who can adorn the 
page of history, is not always equal to form it. 
Robertson, after his successful history of Scot- 
land, was long irresolute in his designs, and so 
unpractised in researches of the sort he was 
desirous of attempting, that his admirers had 
nearly lost his popular productions, had not a 
fortunate introduction to Dr. Birch enabled him 
to open the clasped books, and to drink of the 
sealed fountains. Robertson has confessed his 
inadequate knowledge and his overflowing gra- 
titude, in letters which I have elsewhere printed. 
A suggestion by a man of letters has opened the 
career of many an aspirant ; a hint from Walsh 
conveyed a new conception of English poetry 
to one of its masters. The celebrated treatise 
of Grotius, on " Peace and War," was projected 
by Peiresc. It was said of Magliabechi, who 
knew all books and never wrote one, that by 



264 THE MAN 0P LETTERS. 

his diffusive communications he was in some 
respect concerned in all the great works of 
his times. Sir Robert Cotton greatly assisted 
Camden and Speed ; and that hermit of litera- 
ture, Baker o p -Cambridge, was still supplying 
with his invaluable researches, Burnet, Kennet, 
Hearne, of Middleton. Such is the concealed 
aid which these men of letters afford our authors, 
and which we may compare to those subterra- 
neous streams, which flowing into spacious lakes, 
are still, unobserved, enlarging the waters which 
attract the public eye. 

Such are these men of letters ! but the last 
touches of their picture, given with all the 
delicacy and warmth of a self-painter, may come 
from the Count de Caylus, celebrated for his col- 
lections and for his generous patronage of artists. 

" His glory is confined to the mere power 
which he has of being one day useful to letters 
and to the arts ; for his whole life is employed 
in collecting materials of which learned men and 
artists- make no use till after the death of him 
who amassed them. It affords him a very sen- 
sible pleasure to labour in hopes of being useful 
to those who pursue the same course of studies, 
while there are so great a number who die with- 
out discharging the debt which they incur to 
society." 



( 265 ) 

CHAPTER XVFI. 
LITERARY OLD AGE. 

The old age of the literary character retains its 
enjoyments, and usually its powers, — a happi- 
ness which accompanies no other. The old age 
of coquetry with extinct beauty ; that of the 
used idler left without a sensation ; that of a 
grasping Croesus, who envies his heir ; or that 
of the Machiavel who has no longer a voice in 
the cabinet, makes all these persons resemble un- 
happy spirits who cannot find their graves. But 
for the aged man of letters memory returns to 
her stores, and imagination is still on the wing, 
amidst fresh discoveries and new designs. The 
others fall like dry leaves, but he like ripe fruit, 
and is valued when nu longer on the tree. 

The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, 
are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. 
The curious mind is still striking out into new 
pursuits ; and the mind of genius is still creating. 
Ancora imparo ! — " Yet I am learning !" Such 
was the concise inscription of an ingenious de- 
vice of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, 
with an hour-glass upon it, which Michael Ange- 



266 LITERARY OLD AGE. 

lo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth 
year.* 

Time, the great destroyer of other men's hap- 
piness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature 
to its possessor. A learned and highly intel- 
lectual friend once said to me, " If 1 have ac- 
quired more knowledge these last four years 
than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to 
my stores in the next four years ; and so at every 
subsequent period of my life, should I acquire 
only in the same proportion, the general mass of 
my knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we 
are not deprived by nature or misfortune, of the 
means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of 
knowledge, I do not see but we may be still 
fully occupied and deeply interested even to 
the last day of our earthly term." In such pur- 
suits, where life is rather wearing out, than rust- 
ing out, as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, 
death scarcely can take us by surprise ; and much 
less by those continued menaces which shake the 
old age of men, of no intellectual pursuits, who 
are dying so many years. 

* This characteristic form closes the lectures of Mr. Fuseil, who 
thus indirectly reminds us of the last words of Reynolds ; and 
the graver of Biake, vital as the pencil of Fuseli, has raised the 
person of Michael Angelo with its admirable portrait, breath- 
ing inspiration. 



LITERARY OLD AGE. 267 

Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, 
constitute the happiness of literary men ; the 
study of the arts and literature spread a sun- 
shine in the winter of their days ; and their own 
works may be as delightful to themselves, as 
roses plucked by the Norwegian amidst his 
snows; and they will discover that unregarded 
kindness of nature, who has given flowers that 
only open in the evening, and flower through the 
night-time. Necker offers a beautiful instance 
even of the influence of late studies in life ; for 
he tells us, that " the era of three-score and ten 
is an agreeable age for writing ; your mind has 
not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you in peace." 
The opening of one of La Mothe le Vayer's 
Treatises is striking : " I should but ill return 
the favours God has granted me in the eightieth 
year of my age, should I allow myself to give 
way to that shameless want of occupation which 
I have condemned all my life ;" and the old 
man proceeds with his " observations on the 
composition and reading of books." The lite- 
rary character has been fully occupied in the 
eightieth and the ninetieth year of life. Isaac 
Walton still glowed while writing some of the 
most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth 
year, and in his ninetieth enriched the poetical 
world with the first publication of a romantic 
tale by Chalkhill, " the friend of Spenser." Bod- 
mer, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, 



268 LITERARY OLD AGE. 

and Wieland on Cicero's Letters.* But the 
delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course 
of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of 
youth even to old age ; the revolutions of mo- 
dern chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr. Reid 
to his latest days ; and a deservedly popular au- 
thor, now advanced in life, at this moment, has 
discovered, in a class of reading to which he had 
never been accustomed, what will probably sup- 
ply him with fresh furniture for his mind during 
life. Even the steps of time are retraced, and 
what has passed away again becomes ours ; for 
in advanced life a return to our early studies re- 
freshes and renovotes the spirits ; we open the 
poets who made us enthusiasts, and the philoso- 
phers who taught us to think, with a new source 
of feeling in our own experience. Adam Smith 
confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to pro- 
fessor Dugald Stewart, while " he was reperusing, 
with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic po- 
ets of ancient Greece, and Sophocles and Ei 
pides lay open on his table." 



Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, 
Et Sophocle k cent ans peint encore Antigone. 



i; pu- 

Euri- 



The calm philosophic Hume found death only 
could interrupt the keen pleasure he was again 
receiving from Lucian, and which could inspire 

* See Curiosities of Literature on " The progress of old age 
in new studies," Vol. i. 170. Sixth Edition. 



LITERARY OLD AGE. 269 

him at the moment with a humorous self-dia- 
logue with Charon. 

Not without a sense of exultation has the lite- 
rary character felt this happiness, in the unbroken 
chain of his habits and his feelings. Hobbes ex- 
ulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was 
still the same Hobbes; and to demonstrate the 
reality of this existence, published, in the eighty- 
seventh year of his age, his version of the Odys- 
sey, and the following year, his Iliad. Of the 
happy results of literary habits in advanced life, 
the Count de Tressan, the elegant abridger of the 
old French romances, in his " literary advice to 
his children," has drawn a most pleasing picture. 
With a taste for study, which he found rather in- 
convenient in the moveable existence of a man of 
the world, and a military wanderer, he had however 
contrived to reserve an hour or two every day for 
literary pursuits ; the men of science, with whom 
he had chiefly associated, appear to have turned 
his passion to observation and knowledge, rather 
than towards imagination and feeling ; the com- 
bination formed a wreath for his grey hairs. 
When Count de Tressan retired from a brilliant 
to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he 
pursued his literary tastes, with the vivacity of 
a young author inspired by the illusion of fame. 
At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination 
y 2 



270 LITERARY OLD AGE. 

of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recom- 
posed his old Chivalric Romances, and his rean- 
imated fancy struck fire in the veins of the 
old man. Among the first designs of his retire- 
ment was a singular philosophical legacy for his 
children ; it was a view of the history and pro- 
gress of the human mind — of its principles, its 
errors, and its advantages, as these were reflected 
in himself; in the dawnings of his taste, the 
secret inclinations of his mind, which the men 
of genius of the age with whom he associated 
had developed ; in expatiating on their memory, 
he calls on his children to witness the happiness 
of study, in those pleasures which were soothing 
and adorning his old age. " Without know- 
ledge, without literature," exclaims the venera- 
ble enthusiast, " in whatever rank we are born, 
we can only resemble the vulgar." To the Cen- 
tenary Fontenelle the Count de Tressan was 
chiefly indebted for the happy life he derived 
from the cultivation of literature ; and when this 
man of a hundred years died, Tressan, himself 
on the borders of the grave, would offer the last 
fruits of his mind in an eloge to his ancient 
master; it was the voice of the dying to the 
dead, a last moment of the love and sensibility 
of genius, which feeble life could not extinguish. 



LITERARY OLD AGE. 271 

If the genius of Cicero, inspired by the love 
of literature, has thrown something delightful 
over this latest season of life, in his de Senectute; 
and if to have written on old age, in old age, 
is to have obtained a triumph over time,* the 
literary character, when he shall discover him- 
self like a stranger in a new world, when all 
that he loved has not life, and all that lives has 
no love for old age ; when he shall find himself 
grown obsolete, when his ear shall cease to 
listen, and nature has locked up the man entirely 
within himself, even then the votary of literature 
shall not feel the decline of life ; — preserving the 
flame alive on the altar, and even at his last 
moments, in the act of sacrifice. Such was the 
fate, perhaps now told for the first time, of the 
great Lord Clarendon ; it was in the midst of 
composition that his pen suddenly fell from his 
hand on the paper, he took it up again, and 
again it fell ; deprived of the sense of touch, he 
found his hand without motion ; the earl per- 
ceived himself struck by palsy — and thus was 
the life of the noble exile closed amidst the 
warmth of a literary work, unfinished. 

* Spurinna, or the Comforts of Old Age, by Sir Thomas 
Bernard. 



( 272 ) 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

LITERARY HONOURS. 

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open 
for those ingenious men who are deprived of 
honours or of wealth. Like that illustrious Ro- 
man who owed nothing to his ancestors, videtur 
ex se naius, they seem self-born ; and in the 
baptism of fame, they have given themselves 
their name. The sons of a sword-maker, a pot- 
ter, and a tax-gatherer, were the greatest of 
Orators, the most majestic of poets, and the most 
graceful of the satirists of antiquity. The elo- 
quent Massillon, the brilliant Flechier, Rousseau 
and Diderot ; Johnson, Akenside, and Franklin, 
arose amidst the most humble avocations. 

It is the prerogative of genius to elevate ob- 
scure men to the higher class of society ; if the 
influence of wealth in the present day has been 
justly said to have created a new aristocracy of 
its own, and where they already begin to be 
jealous of their ranks, we may assert that genius 
creates a sort of intellectual nobility, -which is 
conferred on some Literary Characters by the 
involuntary feelings of the public ; and were 



LITERARY HONOURS. 273 

men of genius to bear arms, they might consist 
not of imaginary things, of griffins and chime- 
ras, but of deeds performed and of public works 
in existence. When Dondi raised the great as- 
tronomical clock at the University of Padua 
which was long the admiration of Europe, it 
gave a name and nobility to its maker and all 
his descendants ; there still lives a Marquis Dondi 
daP Horologio. Sir Hugh Middleton, in memory 
of his vast enterprise, changed his former arms 
to bear three piles, by which instruments he had 
strengthened the works he had invented, when 
his genius poured forth the waters through our 
metropolis, distinguishing it from all others in 
the world. Should not Evelyn have inserted 
an oak-tree in his bearings ? for our author's 
" Sylva" occasioned the plantation of " many 
millions of timber-trees," and the present navy 
of Great Britain has been constructed with the 
oaks which the genius of Evelyn planted. If 
the public have borrowed the names of some 
Lords to grace a Sandwich and a Spencer, we 
may be allowed to raise into titles of literary 
nobility those distinctions which the public voice 
has attached to some authors; JEschylus Potter, 
Athenian Stuart, and Anacreon Moore. 

This intellectual nobility is not chimerical j 
does it not separate a man from the crowd ? When- 



274 LITERARY HONOURS. 

ever the rightful possessor appears, will not the 
eyes of all spectators be fixed on him ? I allude 
to scenes which I have witnessed. Will not 
even literary honours add a nobility to nobility ? 
and teach the nation to esteem a name which 
might otherwise be hidden under its rank, and 
remain unknown ? Our illustrious list of literary 
noblemen is far more glorious than the satirical 
" Catalogue of Noble Authors," drawn up by a 
polished and heartless cynic, who has pointed 
his biilliant shafts at all who were chivalrous in 
spirit, or appertained to the family of genius. 
One may presume on the existence of this in- 
tellectual nobility, from the extraordinary cir- 
cumstance that the Great have actually felt a 
jealousy of the literary rank. But no rivality 
can exist in the solitary honour conferred on an 
author ; an honour not derived from birth, nor 
creation, but from public opinion ; and as in- 
separable from his name, as an essential quality 
is from its object ; for the diamond will sparkle 
and the rose will be fragrant, otherwise, it is 
no diamond nor rose. The great may well 
condescend to be humble to Genius, since genius 
pays its homage in becoming proud of that hu- 
mility. Cardinal Richelieu was mortified at the 
celebrity of the unbending Corneille ; several 
noblemen were at Pope's indifference to their 
rank; and Magliabechi, the book-prodigy of his 
age, whom every literary stranger visited at 



LITERARY HONOURS. 275 

Florence, assured Lord Raley, that the Duke 
of Tuscany had become jealous of the attention 
he was receiving from foreigners, as they usu- 
ally went first to see Magliabechi before the 
Grand Duke. A confession by Montesquieu 
states, with open caudour, a fact in his life, which 
confirms this jealousy of the Great with the Li- 
terary Character. " On ray entering into life, 
I was spoken of as a man of talents, and people 
of condition gave me a favourable reception; 
but when the success of my Persian Letters 
proved perhaps that I was not unworthy of my 
reputation, and the public began to esteem me, 
my reception with the great was discouraging, 
and I experienced innumerable mortifications." 
Montesquieu subjoins a reflection sufficiently 
humiliating for the mere nobleman : " The 
Great, inwardly wounded with the glory of a 
celebrated name, seek to humble it. In general 
he only can patiently endure the fame of others, 
who deserves fame himself." This sort of jea- 
lousy unquestionably prevailed in the late Lord 
Orford ; a wit, a man of the world, and a man 
of rank, but while he considered literature as a 
mere amusement, he was mortified at not ob- 
taining literary celebrity ; he felt his authorial, 
always beneath his personal character ; he broke 
with every literary man who looked up to him 
as their friend ; and how he has delivered his 



276 LITERARY HONOURS. 

feelings on Johnson, Goldsmith and Gray, whom 
unfortunately for him he personally knew, it fell 
to my lot to discover; I could add, but not dimi- 
nish, what has been called the severity of that 
delineation-* 

Who was the dignified character, Lord Ches- 
terfield or Samuel Johnson, when the great au- 
thor, proud of his labour, rejected his lordship's 
sneaking patronage ? " I value myself," says 
Swift, " upon making the ministry desire to be 
acquainted with Parnell, and not Parnell with 
the ministry." Piron would not suffer the Lite- 
rary Character to be lowered in his presence. 
Entering the apartment of a nobleman, who was 
conducting another peer to the stairs head, the 
latter stopped to make way for Piron. " Pass 
on my lord," said the noble master, " pass, he 
is only a poet." Piron replied, " since our qual- 
ities are declared, I shall take my rank," and 
placed himself before the lord. Nor is this 
pride, the true source of elevated character, re- 
fused to the great artist as well as the great au- 
thor. Michael Angelo, invited by Julius II. to 
the Court of Rome, found that intrigue had in- 
disposed his Holiness towards him, and more than 
once, the great artist was suffered to linger in at- 

* Calamities of Authors, vol. i. 



LITERARY HONOURS. 277 

tendance in the anti-chamber. One day the in- 
dignant man of genius exclaimed, " tell his 
holiness, if he wants me, he must look for me 
elsewhere." He flew back to his beloved Flo- 
rence, to proceed with that celebrated cartoon, 
which afterwards became a favourite study with 
all artists. Thrice the Pope wrote for his return, 
and at length menaced the little state of Tuscany 
with war, if Michael Angelo prolonged his ab- 
sence. He returned. The sublime artist knelt 
at the feet of the Father of the Church, turning 
aside his troubled countenance in silence ; an in- 
termeddling Bishop offered himself as a mediator, 
apologising for our artist by observing, that " of 
this proud humour are these painters made !" Ju- 
lius turned to this pitiable mediator, and, as Vasari 
tells used a switch on this occasion, observing, 
H you speak injuriously of him, while I am silent. 
It is you who are ignorant." Raising Michael 
Angelo, Julius II. embraced the man of genius. 
" I can make lords of you every day, but I can- 
not create a Titian," said the Emperor Charles 
V. to his courtiers, who had become jealous of 
the hours, and the half-hours, which that mon- 
arch managed, that he might converse with the 
man of genius at his work. There is an elevated 
intercourse between Power and Genius ; and if 
they are deficient in reciprocal esteem, neither 
are great. The intellectual nobility seems to 



278 LITERARY HONOURS. 

have been asserted by De Harlay, a great French 
statesman, for when the academy was once not 
received with royal honours, he complained to 
the French monarch, observing, that when " a 
man of letters was presented to Francis I. for the 
first time, the king always advanced three steps 
from the throne to receive him." 

If ever the voice of individuals can recom- 
pense a life of literary labour it is in speaking a 
foreign accent — it sounds like the distant plau- 
dit of posterity. The distance of space between 
the literary character and the inquirer in some 
respects represents the distance of time which 
separates the author from the next age. Fon- 
tenelle was never more gratified than when a 
Swede, arriving at the gates of Paris, inquired of 
the custom-house officers where Fontenelle re- 
sided, and expressed his indignation that not 
one of them had ever heard of his name. Hobbes 
expresses his proud delight that his portrait was 
sought after by foreigners, and that the Great 
Duke of Tuscany made the philosopher the ob- 
ject of his first inquiries. Camden was not in- 
sensible to the visits of German noblemen, who 
were desirous of seeing the British Pliny; and 
Pocock, while he received no aid from patronage 
at home for his Oriental studies, never relaxed 
in those unrequited labours, from the warm per- 



LITERARY HONOURS. 279 

sonal testimonies of learned foreigners, who has- 
tened to see and converse with this prodigy of 
eastern learning. 

Yes ! to the very presence of the man of genius 
will the world spontaneously pay their tribute of 
respect, of admiration, or of love ; many a pil- 
grimage has he lived to receive, and many a 
crowd has followed his footsteps. There are 
days in the life of genius which repay its suffer- 
ings. Demosthenes confessed he was pleased 
when even a fish-woman of Athens pointed him 
out. Corneille had his particular seat in the 
theatre, and the audience would rise to salute 
him when he entered. At the presence of Raynal 
in the House of Commons, the speaker was re- 
quested to suspend the debate till that illustrious 
foreigner, who had written on the English parlia- 
ment, was there planed and distinguished, to his 
honour. Spinosa, when he gained a humble 
livelihood by grinding optical glasses, at an ob- 
scure village in Holland, was visited by the first 
General in Europe, who, for the sake of this 
philosophical conference, suspended his march. 

In all ages, and in all countries, has this feeling 
been created ; nor is it a temporary ebullition, 
nor an individual honour ; it comes out of the 
heart of man. In Spain, whatever was most beau- 
tiful in its kind was described by the name of the 



280 LITERARY HONOURS. 

great Spanish bard ; every thing excellent was 
called a Lope. Italy would furnish a volume of 
the public honours decreed to literary men, nor 
is that spirit extinct, though the national character 
has fallen by the chance of fortune; and Metas- 
tasio and Tiraboschi received what had been 
accorded to Petrarch and to Poggio. Germany, 
patriotic to its literary characters, is the land of 
the enthusiasm of genius. On the borders of the 
Linnet, in the public walk of Zurich, the monu- 
ment of Gesner, erected by the votes of his fellow- 
citizens, attests their sensibility ; and a solemn 
funeral honoured the remains of Klopstock, led 
by the senate of Hamburgh, with fifty thousand 
votaries, so penetrated by one universal sentiment, 
that this multitude preserved a mournful silence, 
and the interference of the police ceased to be 
necessary through the city at the solemn burial 
of the man of genius. Has even Holland proved 
insensible ? The statue of Erasmus, in Rotter- 
dam, still animates her young students, and offers 
a noble example to her neighbours of the influ- 
ence even of the sight of the statue of a man of 
genius ; nor must it be forgotten that the senate 
of Rotterdam declared of the emigrant Bayle, 
that " such a man should not be considered as a 
foreigner." In France, since Francis I. created 
genius, and Louis XIV. knew to be liberal to it, 
the impulse was communicated to the French 
people. There tbe statues of their illustrious 



LITERARY HONOURS. 281 

men spread inspiration on the spots which living 
they would have haunted — in their theatres the 
great dramatists ; in their Institute their illus- 
trious authors ; in their public edifices their other 
men of genius * This is worthy of the country 
which privileged the family of La Fontaine to 
be for ever exempt from taxes, and decreed that 
the productions of the mind were not seizable, 
when the creditors of Crebillon would have at- 
tached the produce of his tragedies. These dis- 
tinctive honours accorded to genius were in 
unison with their decree respecting the will of 
Bayle. It was the subject of a lawsuit between 
the heir of the will, and the inheritor by blood. 
The latter contested that this great literary cha- 
racter, being a fugitive for religion and dying in 
a prohibited country, was without the power of 
disposing of his property, and that our author, 

* We cannot bury the Fame of our English worthies— that 
exists before us, independent of ourselves ; but we bury the 
influence of their inspiring presence in those immortal memo- 
rials of genius easy to be read by all men, their statues and their 
busts, consigning them to spots seldom visited, and often too 
obscure to be viewed. Count Algarotti has ingeniously said, 
'.* L'argent que nous employons en tabatieres et en pompons 
servoit aux anciens a celebrer la memoire des grands hommes 
par des monumens dignes de passer a la posterite ; et la ou Ton 
brule des feux de joie pour une victoire remportee, ils eleverent 
des arcs de triomphe de porphyre et de marbre." May we 
not, for our honour, and for the advantage of our artists, pre- 
dict better times for ourselves ? 
z2 



282 LITERARY HONOURS. 

when he resided in Holland, was civilly dead. 
In the parliament of Toulouse the judge decided 
that learned men are free in all countries; that 
he who had sought in a foreign land an asylum 
from his love of letters, was no fugitive ; that it 
was unworthy of France to treat as a stranger 
a son in whom she gloried; and he protested 
against the notion of a civil death to such a man 
as Bayle, whose name was living throughout Eu- 
rope. 

Even the most common objects are conse- 
crated when associated with the memory of the 
man of genius. We still seek for his tomb on 
the spot where it has vanished ; the enthusiasts 
of genius still wander on the hills of Pausilippe, 
and muse on Virgil to retrace his landscape ; or 
as Sir William Jones ascended Forest-hill, with 
the Allegro in his hand, and step by step, seemed 
in his fancy to have trodden in the foot-path of 
Milton ; there is a grove at Magdalen College 
which retains the name of Addison's walk, where 
still the student will linger ; and there is a cave 
at Macao, which is still visited by the Portugueze 
from a national feeling, where Camoens is said 
to have composed his Lusiad. When Petrarch 
wa^ passing by his native town, he was received 
with the honours of his fame ; but when the 
lu ads of the town, unawares to Petrarch, con- 



LITERARY HONOURS. 283 

ducted bim to the house where the poet was 
born, and informed him that the proprietor 
had often wished to make alterations, but that 
the towns-people had risen to insist that the 
house which has consecrated by the birth of 
Petrarch should be preserved unchanged ; this 
was a triumph more affecting to Petrarch than 
his coronation at Rome. In the village of Cer- 
taldo is still shown the house of Boccaccio ; and 
on a turret are seen the arms of the Medici, which 
they had sculptured there, with an inscription al- 
luding to a small house and a name which filled 
the world. " Foreigners," says Anthony Wood of 
Milton, " have, out of pure devotion, gone to 
Bread-street to see the house and chamber where 
he was born ;" and at Paris the house which 
Voltaire inhabited, and at Ferney his study, are 
both preserved inviolate. Thus is the very 
apartment of a man of genius, the chair he 
studied in, the table he wrote on, contemplated 
with curiosity; the spot is full of local im- 
pressions. And all this happens from an unsatis- 
fied desire to see and hear him whom we never 
can see nor hear ; yet in a moment of illusion, 
if we listen to a traditional conversation, if we 
can revive one of his feelings, if we can catch 
but a dim image of his person, we reproduce 
this man of genius before us, on whose features 
we so often dwell. Even the rage of the mili- 



284 LITERARY HONOURS. 

tary spirit has taught itseif to respect the abode 
of genius ; and Caesar and Sylla, who never 
spared their own Roman blood, alike felt their 
spirit rebuked, and saved the literary city of 
Athens. The house of the man of genius has 
been spared amidst contending empires, from 
the days of Pindar to those of Buffon ; and the 
recent letter of Prince Schwartzenberg to the 
Countess, for the preservation of the philoso- 
pher's chateau, is a memorial of this elevated 
feeling.* 

And the meanest things, the very household 
stuff, associated with the memory of the man of 
genius, become the objects of our affections. At 

* In the grandeur of Milton's verse we perceive the feeling 
he associated with this literary honour. 

" The great Emathian conqueror bid spare 
The house of Pindarus when temple and tower 
Went to the ground .." — Sonnet VIII. 

" To the Countess of Buffon, in Montbard. 

il The Emperor, my Sovereign, having ordered me to pro- 
vide for the security of all places dedicated to the sciences, 
and of such as recall the remembrance of men who have done 
honour to the age in which they lived, I have the honour to 
send to your ladyship a safeguard for your chateau of Mont- 
bard. 

" The residence of the Historian of Nature must be sacred 
in the eyes of all the friends of science. It is a domain 
which belongs to all mankind. — I have the honour, &c. 

" ScHWARTZENBERG." 



LITERARY HONOURS. 2Q5 

a festival in honour of Thomson the poet, the 
chair in which he composed part of his Seasons 
was produced, and appears to have communicat- 
ed some of the raptures to which he was liable 
who had sat in that chair ; Rabelais, among his 
drollest inventions, could not have imagined that 
his old cloak would have been preserved in the 
University of Montpellier for future doctors to 
wear on the day they took their degree ; nor 
could Shakespeare, that the mulberry tree which 
he planted would have been multiplied into re- 
lics. But in such instances the feeling is right 
with a wrong direction ; and while the populace 
are exhausting their emotions on an old tree, an 
old chair, and an old cloak, they are paying that 
involuntary tribute to genius which forms its pride, 
and will generate the race. 



( 286 ) 



CHAPTER XIX. 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 



Wherefore should not the literary character 
be associated in utility or glory with the other 
professional classes of society? These indeed 
press more immediately on the attention of men; 
they are stimulated by personal interests, and 
they are remunerated by honours; while the 
literary character, from its habits, is secluded ; 
producing its usefulness in concealment, and 
often at a late period in life ; not always too of 
immediate application, and often even unvalued 
by the passing generation. 

It is curious to observe of the characters of the 
other classes in society, how each rises or falls in 
public esteem, according to the exigencies of the 
times. Ere we had swept from the seas all the 
fleets of our rivals, the naval hero was the popu- 
lar character ; while the military, from the poli- 
tical panic occasioned by standing armies, was 
invariably lowered in public regard ; the extra- 
ordinary change of circumstances, and the genius 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 28? 

of one man, have entirely reversed the public 
feeling.* 

The commercial character was long, even in 
this country, placed very low in the scale of 
honour ; the merchant was considered merely as 
a money-trader, profiting by the individual dis- 
tress of the nobleman, and afterwards was viewed 
with jealous eyes by the country gentleman. A 
Dutch monarch, who initiated us into the myste- 
ries of banks and loans, by combining commercial 
influence with political power, raised the mercan- 
tile character. 

But the commercial prosperity of a nation 
inspires no veneration in mankind ; nor will its 
military power win their affection. There is an 
interchange of opinions, as well as of spices and 
specie, which induces nations to esteem each 
other ; and there is a glorious succession of au- 

* Mr. Gilford, in his notes to his recent Translation of Per- 
sius, with his accustomed keenness of spirit, has detected this 
fact in our popular manners. " Persius, whenever he has oc- 
casion for a more worthless character than ordinary, common- 
ly repairs to the camp for him. Fielding and Smollet, in com- 
pliance with the cant of their times, manifested a patriotic 
abhorrence of the military ; and seldom went farther for a 
blockhead, a parasite, or an adept in low villainy, than the Ar- 
mylist. We have outlived this stupid piece of injustice, and a 
' led-captain' is no longer considered as the indispensable rice 
of every novel." 



288 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

thors, as well as of seamen and soldiers, for ever 
standing before the eyes of the universe. 

It is by our authors that foreigners have been 
taught to subdue their own prejudices. About 
the year 1700, the Italian Gemelli told all Eu- 
rope that he could find nothing among us but 
our writings to distinguish us from the worst of 
barbarians. Our civil wars, and our great revo- 
lution, had probably disturbed the Italian's ima- 
gination. Too long we appeared a people whose 
genius partook of the density and variableness of 
our climate, incapacitated even by situation, from 
the enjoyment of arts which had not yet travel- 
led to us ; and as if Nature herself had designed 
to disjoin us from more polished neighbours and 
brighter skies. We now arbitrate among the 
nations of the world ; we possess their involunta- 
ry esteem ; nor is there a man of genius among 
them who stands unconnected with our intellec- 
tual sovereignty. 

11 We conquered France, but felt our captive's charms, 
Her arts victorious triumphed o'er our arms." 

At the moment Pope was writing these lines, 
that silent operation of genius had commenced, 
which changes the fate of nations. The first 
writers of France were passing over into England 
to learn to think and write, or thought mA wrote 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 289 

like Englishmen in France.* This singular revo- 
lution in the human mind, and, by its re-action, 
in human affairs, was not effected by merchants 
profiting over them by superior capital ; or by ad- 
mirals and generals humiliating them by victories ; 
but by our authors, whose works are now printed 
at foreign presses, a circumstance which proves, 
as much as the commerce and prowess of Eng- 
land, the ascendancy of her genius. Even had 
our nation displayed more limited resources than 
its awful powers have opened ; had the sphere of 

* Voltaire borrowed all the genius of our country; our 
poetry and our philosophy. Buffon began by translating 
Hales's " Vegetable Static's;" and before Linnaeus classed his 
plants, and Buffon began his Natural History, our own na- 
turalist Ray had opened their road to Nature. Bacon, New- 
ton, aud Boyle, reduced the fanciful philosophy of France 
into experiment and demonstration. Helvetius, Diderot, and 
their brothers, gleaned their pre <0 Med discoveries from our 
Shaftesbury, Mandeville. and Tolani whom sometimes they 
only translated. Even our novelists were closely imitated. — 
Our great compilations of voyages and travels, Hackluyt, 
Churchill, &c furnished Montesquieu with the moral facts he 
required for his large picture of his "Esprit des Loix." The 
Cyclopaedia of Chambers Avas the parent of the French work. 
Even historical compilers existed in our country before the 
race appeared in France. Our Universal History, and Stan- 
ley, Echard, and Hooke, preceded B-ollin and other French 
abridgers of history ; while Hume and our philosophical his- 
torians set them a nobler example, which remains for them 
yet to rival. 

a a 



90 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

its dominion been only its island boundaries, 
could the same literary character have predomi- 
nated, we might have attained to the same emi- 
nence and admiration in the hearts of our conti- 
nental neighbours. The small cities of Athens 
and of Florence will perpetually attest the influ- 
ence of the literary character over other nations - 9 
the one received the tributes of the mistress of 
the universe, when the Romans sent their youth 
to be educated at Athens ; while the other, at the 
revival of letters, beheld every polished European 
crowding to its little court. 

There is a small portion of men, who appear 
marked out by nature and habit, for the purpose 
of cultivating their thoughts in peace, and giving 
activity to their sentiments, by disclosing them 
to the people. Tbnse who govern a nation can- 
not at the same tinle enlighten them ; — authors 
stand between the governors and the governed. 

Important discoveries are often obtained by ac- 
cident ; but the single thought of a man of genius, 
which has sometimes changed the dispositions of 
a people, and even of an age, is slowly matured 
in meditation. Even the mechanical inventions 
of genius must first become perfect in its own so- 
litary abode, ere the world can possess them. 
The people are a vast body, of which men of 






THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 291 



genius are the eyes and the hands ; and the pub- 
lic mind is the creation of the philosophical wri- 
ter ; these are axioms as demonstrable as any in 
Euclid, and as sure in their operation, as any 
principle in mechanics. When Epicurus publish- 
ed his doctrines, men immediately began to ex- 
press themselves with freedom on the established 
religion ; the dark and fearful superstitions of pa- 
ganism fell into neglect, and mouldered away, 
the inevitable fate of established falsehood. 
When Machiavel, living amidst the principalities 
of Italy, where stratagem and assassination were 
the politics of those wretched rivals, by lifting 
the veil from these cabinets of banditti, that ca- 
lumniated men of genius, alarmed the world by 
exposing a system subversive of all human virtue 
and happiness, and led the way to political free- 
dom. When Locke and Montesquieu appeared, 
the old systems of government were reviewed ; 
the principles of legislation were developed : 
and many changes have succeeded, and are still 
to succeed. Politicians affect to disbelieve that 
abstract principles possess any considerable influ- 
ence on the conduct of the subject. " In times 
of tranquillity," they say, "they are not wanted, 
and in times of confusion they are never heard." 
But this has been their error ; it is in leisure, 
when they are not wanted, that they are studied 
by the speculative part of mankind ; and when 



292 TH E INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

they are wanted, they are already prepared for 
the active multitude, who come like a phalanx, 
pressing each other with an unity of feeling and 
an integrity of force. Paley would not close his 
eyes on what was passing before him ; and he has 
observed, that during the convulsive troubles at 
Geneva, the political theory of Rousseau was 
prevalent in their contests ; while in the political 
disputes of our country, those ideas of civil au- 
thority displayed in the works of Locke, recurred 
in every form. How, therefore, can the charac- 
ter of an author be considered as subordinate in 
society ? Politicians do not secretly think so, at 
the moment they are proclaiming it to the world ; 
nor do they fancy, as they would have us ima- 
gine, that paper and pens are only rags and fea- 
thers ; whatever they affect, the truth is, that 
they consider the worst actions of men, as of far 
less consequence than the propagation of their 
opinions. They well know, as Sophocles de- 
clared, that " opinion is ever stronger than truth." 
Have politicians not often exposed their disguis- 
ed terrors ? Books, and sometimes their authors, 
have been burnt ; but burning books is no part of 
their refutation. Cromwell was alarmed when 
he saw the Oceana of Harrington, and dreaded 
the effects of that volume more than the plots of 
the royalists; while Charles II. trembled at an 
author, only in his manuscript state ; and in the 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 293 

height of terror, and to the honour of genius, it 
was decreed, that " Scribere est agere."^ 

Observe the influence of authors in forming 
the character of men, where the solitary man of 
genius stamps his own on a people. The par- 
simonious habits, the money-getting precepts, 
the wary cunning, and not the most scrupulous 
means to obtain the end, of Dr. Franklin, im- 
printed themselves on his Americans ; loftier 
feelings could not elevate a man of genius, who 
became the founder of a trading people, retain- 
ing the habits of a journeyman printer : while 
the elegant tastes of Sir William Jones could 
inspire the servants of a commercial corporation 
to open new and vast sources of knowledge ; a 
mere company of traders, influenced by the lite- 
rary character, enlarge the stores of the imagina- 

* Algernon Sydney was condemned to death for certain 
manuscripts found in his library ; and the reason alleged was, 
that scribere est agere — that to write is to act. The papers which 
served to condemn Sydney, it appears, were only answers to 
Filmer's obsolete Defence of Monarchical Tyranny. — The 
metaphysical inference drawn by the crown lawyers is not a 
necessary consequence. Authors may write that which they 
may not afterwards approve; their manuscript opinions are 
very liable to be changed, and authors even change those 
opinions they have published. A man ought only to lose his 
head for his opinions, in the metaphysical sense ; opinions 
against opinions; but not an axe against a pen. 

A a 2 




294 T HE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

tion, and collect fresh materials for the history of 
human nature. 

I have said that authors produce their useful- 
ness in privacy, and that their good is not of 
immediate application, and often unvalued by 
their own generation. On this occasion the 
name of Evelyn always occurs to me. This 
author supplied the public with nearly thirty 
works, at a time when taste and curiosity were 
not yet domiciliated in our country ; his patriot- 
ism warmed beyond the eightieth year of his age ; 
and in his dying hand he held another legacy for 
his nation. Whether his enthusiasm was intro- 
ducing to us a taste for medals and prints ; or 
intent on purifying the city of smoke and smells, 
and to sweeten it by plantations of native plants; 
or having enriched our orchards and our gardens; 
placed summer-ices on our tables, and varied 
even the sallads of our country ; furnishing " a 
Gardener's Kalendar," which, as Cowly said, was 
to last as long " as months and years," and the 
horticulturist will not forget Father Evelyn in the 
heir of his fame, Millar ; whelher the philosopher 
of the Royal Society, or the lighter satirist of the 
toilette, or the fine moralist for active as well as 
co >tem;>laiive life ; — yet in all these changes of a 
studious life, the better part of his history has 
not been told.— While Britain retains her awful 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 295 

situation among the nations of Europe, the 
" Sylva" of Evelyn will endure with her tri- 
umphant oaks. In the third edition of that 
work the heart of the patriot exults at its result : 
he tells Charles I. " how many millions of tim- 
ber trees, besides infinite others, have been 
propagated and planted at the instigation, and 
hy the sole direction of this work" It was an 
author in his studious retreat, who casting a 
prophetic eye on the age we live in, secured the 
late victories of our naval sovereignty. Inquire 
at the Admiralty how the fleets of Nelson have 
been constructed . ? and they can tell you that it 
was with the oaks which the genius of Evelyn 
planted.* 

The same character existed in France, vihere 
De Serres in 1599 composed a work on the cul- 
tivation of mulberry trees in reference to the art 
of raising silk-worms. He tanght his fellow 
citizens to convert a leaf into silk, and silk to 
become the representative of gold. Our author 
encountered the hostility of the prejudices of his 
times in giving his country one of her staple 
commodities ; but I lately received a medal re- 

* Since this has been written, the Diary of Evelyn is pub- 
lished : it cannot add to his general character, whatever it 
may be : but we may anticipate much curious amusement 
from the diary of a literary character whose studies formed the 
business of life. 



296 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

cenlly struck in honour of De Serres, by the 
Agricultural Society of the department of the 
Seine. We are too slow in commemorating the 
genius of our own country ; and our authors 
are defrauded even in the debt we are daily in- 
curring of their posthumous fame. 

When an author writes on a national subject, 
he awakens all the knowledge which lies buried 
in the sleep of nations ; he calls around him, as 
it were, every man of talents ; and though his 
own fame should be eclipsed by his successors, 
yet the emanation, the morning light, broke from 
his source. Our naturalist Ray, though no man 
was more modest in his claims, delighted to tell a 
friend that " since the publication of his catalogue 
of Cambridge Plants, many were prompted to 
botanical studies, and to herbalise in their walks 
in the fields." A work in France, under the title 
of " L'Ami des Hommes," first spread there a 
general passion for agricultural pursuits ; and al- 
though the national ardour carried all to excess, 
yet marshes were drained and waste lands en- 
closed. The Emilius of Rousseau, whatever 
errors and extravagancies a system which would 
bring us back to nature may contain, operated 
a complete revolution in modern Europe, by 
changing the education of men ; and the bold- 
ness and novelty of some of its principles com- 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 297 

municated a new spring to the human intellect. 
The commercial world owes to two retired phi- 
losophers, in the solitude of their study, Locke 
and Smith, those principles which dignify Trade 
into a liberal pursuit, and connect it with the hap- 
piness of a people. 

Beccaria, who dared to raise his voice in favour 
of humanity, against the prejudices of many cen- 
turies, by his work on " Crimes and Punishments,'* 
at length abolished torture ; and Locke and Vol- 
taire, on " Toleration," have long made us tole- 
rant. But the principles of many works of this 
stamp have become so incorporated in our minds 
and feelings, that we can scarcely at this day con- 
ceive the fervour they excited at the time, or the 
magnanimity of their authors in the decision of 
their opinions. 

And to whom does the world owe more than 
to the founders of miscellaneous writing, or the 
creators of new and elegant tastes in European 
nations ? We possess one peculiar to ourselves. 
To Granger our nation is indebted for that 
visionary delight of recalling from their graves 
the illustrious dead ; and, as it were, of living 
with them, as far as a familiarity with their fea- 
tures and their very looks forms a part of life. 
This pleasing taste for portraits seems peculiar- 



298 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

to our nation, and was created by the ingenuity 
of a solitary author, who had very nearly aban- 
doned those many delightful associations which 
a collection of fine portraits affords, by the want 
of a due comprehension of their nature "among 
his friends, and even at first in the public. Be- 
fore the miscellanists rose, learning was the soli- 
tary enjoyment of the insulated learned; they 
spoke a language of their own \ and they lived 
in a desert, separated from the world : but the 
miscellanists became their interpreters, opening 
a communication between two spots, close to 
each other, yet which were so long separated, 
the closet and the world. These authors were 
not Bacons, Newtons, and Leibnitzes ; but they 
were Addison, Fontenelle, and Feyjoo, the first 
popular authors in their nations who taught En- 
gland, France, and Spain to become a reading 
people ; while their fugitive page imbues with 
intellectual sweetness an uncultivated mind, like 
the perfumed mould which the swimmer in the 
Persian Sadi took up ; it was a piece of common 
earth, but astonished at its fragrance, he asked 
whether it were musk or amber ? " I am nothing 
but earth ; but roses were planted on my soil, 
and their odorous virtues have deliciously pene- 
trated through all my pores ; I have retained the 
infusion of sweetness ; otherwise I had been but 
a lump of earth." 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. £99 

There is a singleness and unity in the pursuits 
of genius, through all ages, which produces a 
sort of consanguinity in the characters of authors. 
Men of genius, in their different classes, living at 
distinct periods, or in remote countries, seem to 
be the same persons with another name : and 
thus the literary character who has long depart- 
ed, seems only to have transmigrated. In the 
great march of the human intellect he is still oc- 
cupying the same place, and he is still carrying 
on, with the same powers, his great work, 
through a line of centuries. 

In the history of genius there is no chronology, 
for to us every thing it has done is present ; and 
the earliest attempt is connected with the most 
recent. Many men of genius must arise before a 
particular man of genius can appear. Before 
Homer there were other bards — we have a ca- 
talogue of their names and works. Corneille 
could not have been the chief dramatist of 
France, had not the founders of the French 
drama preceded him ; and Pope could not have 
appeared before Dryden. Whether the works of 
genius are those of pure imagination, or searches 
after truth, they are alike tinctured by the feelings 
and the events of their times ; but the man of 
genius must be placed in the line of his descent. 



300 T HE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

Aristotle, Hobbes, and Locke, Descartes and 
Newton, approximate more than we imagine. 
The same chain of intellect Aristotle holds, 
through the intervals of time, is held by them ; 
and links will only be added by their successors. 
The naturalists, Pliny, Gesner, Aldrovandus, and 
Buffon, derive differences in their characters, 
from the spirit of the times ; but each only made 
an accession to the family estate, while each was 
the legitimate representative of the family of the 
naturalists. Aristophanes, Moliere, and Foote, 
are brothers of the family of national wits : the 
wit of Aristophanes was a part of the common 
property, and Moliere and Foote were Aristo- 
phanic. Plutarch, La Mothe 3e Vayer, and 
Bayle, alike busied in amassing the materials of 
human thought and human action, with the same 
vigorous and vagrant curiosity, must have had the 
same habits of life. If Plutarch was credulous, 
La Mothe le Vayer sceptical, and Bayle philoso- 
phical, the heirs of the family may differ in their 
dispositions, but no one will arraign ihe integrity 
of the lineal descent. My learned and reflecting 
friend, whose original researches have enriched 
our national history, has thus observed on the 
character of Wicklifie : — " To complete our idea 
of the importance of Wickliffe, it is only neces- 
sary to add, that as his writings made John Huss 
the reformer of Bohemia, so the writings of 



THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 301 

John Huss led Martin Luther to be the reformer 
of Germany ; so extensive and so incalculable 
are the consequences which sometimes follow 
from human actions."* Our historian has accom- 
panied this by giving the very feelings of Luther 
in early life on his first perusal of the works of 
John Huss : we see the spark of creation caught 
at the moment ; a striking influence of the gener- 
ation of character! Thus a father spirit has 
many sons ; and several of the great revolutions 
in the history of man have been opened by such, 
and carried on by that secret creation of minds 
visibly operating on human affairs. In the history 
of the human mind, he takes an imperfect view, 
who is confined to contemporary knowledge, as 
well as he who stops short with the Ancients, 
and has not advanced with their descendants. 
Those who do not carry their researches through 
the genealogical lines of genius, will mutilate 
their minds, and want the perfect strength of an 
entire man. 

Such are " the great lights of the world," by 
whom the torch of knowledge has been succes- 
sively seized and transmitted from one to the 
other. This is that noble image borrowed from 
a Grecian game, which Plato has applied to the 

* Turner's History of England, vol. ii, p. 432. 

b b 



302 THE INFLUENCE OF AUTHORS. 

rapid generations of man, to mark how the eou- 
tinuity of human affairs is maintained from age to 
age. The torch of genius is perpetually trans- 
ferred from hand to hand amidst this fleeting 
scene. 



THE END- 



CONTENTS 



Chapter. p agei 

I. On Literary Characters , . . . 7 

II. Youth of Genius 18 

III. The First Studies 47 

IV. The Irritability of Genius ... 69 
V. The Spirit of Literature, and the 

Spirit of Society 91 

VI. Literary Solitude Ill 

VII. The Meditations of Genius ... 121 

VIII. The Enthusiasm of Genius . . . 142 

IX. Literary Jealousy 165 

X. Want of Mutual Esteem . - . . 170 

XI. Self-praise 175 

XII. The Domestic Life of Genius ... 191 

XIII. The Matrimonial State ..... 212 

XIV. Literary Friendships 230 

XV. The Literary and the Personal Cha- 
racter 236 

XVI. The Man of Letters 247 

XVII. Literary Old Age . . . . . . 265 

XVIII. Literary Honours 272 

XIX. The Influence of Authors .... 286 









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